Nobody Runs Forever

“No, he wouldn’t.”

“He let Keenan know, and then he came looking for me.”

Parker looked at Dalesia’s deadpan profile. “He believed Keenan?”

“He did for a while.” Dalesia grinned, as though there’d never been a real problem. “We worked it out,” he said, “and I asked him aboard. It seemed to follow. If you don’t like the idea, I think we’ll have to sneak up behind him. He’s a jumpy kind of guy.”

“No, McWhitney seemed all right,” Parker said. “We gotta talk a little, though.”

“Yeah, he’ll meet us there.”

“There?”

“Turns out,” Dalesia said, “this is a good time to slip some extra guests into that motel where Jake works, without bothering the official records.”

“I told Briggs we’d put him up there, while the job was going down.”

“We’re all there,” Dalesia said, “you and me and McWhitney. Seems right now there’s an annual slump in their business there.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“The truckers they got all the time, but the civilians taper off around now. The people that did their summer vacation in Maine, the people bringing their kids back to college, that’s all done. Now there’s nothing till next week, when they have what they call the leaf peepers, the people that come out from the cities to watch the leaves turn red. We’re outa here before they show up.”

“Good.”

“I’ve been doing some other stuff, too,” Dalesia said. “I found the intersection where we do it, it’s perfect for us, I’ll show it to you this afternoon. That and the church.”

“The church?”

Dalesia was enjoying his surprise. “Wait for it. We’ll have some lunch with McWhitney, and then I’ll show you around.”

“You’ve been busy,” Parker said.

“Well, we’ve only got four days.”

Since they weren’t actually registered at Jake Beckham’s place, Trails End Motor Inne, they didn’t have lunch there but at a “family” restaurant nearby. McWhitney drove his own car to meet them there, arriving second, and when the hostess walked him toward their table, Parker said, “He looks irritable.”

“He doesn’t know if you’re gonna love him.”

Neither did Parker. He hadn’t picked up much of a sense of the man in that first meeting that Stratton had set up; only McWhitney’s wide-eyed dumb show of innocence when it had turned out that Harbin was wired, and the immediacy of his silent acknowledgment that it was his responsibility to make Harbin disappear. Which he had done, well enough to confound even a professional bounty hunter.

But was this irritable look also an irritable nature, and would it matter? Dalesia had described him as a “little jumpy,” and Parker could well believe it. But, if his jumpiness wouldn’t get in the way, it would be a good thing to have a third in the string, particularly when there were armored car guards to handle, and later, when the faster they switched the cash to their own vehicle the better. And Parker could see where, at a moment when McWhitney had been not only jumpy, but suspicious that Dalesia had ratted him out, it had seemed to Dalesia a good idea to offer him a job.

McWhitney stopped at the table to shake both their hands, he standing, they seated. He didn’t bother to smile during the handshake, but said to Parker, “Good to see you again.”

“You too.”

“Maybe this time it’ll come to something,” McWhitney said, and sat down.

“It’s coming to something, Nels,” Dalesia said. “Parker’s got the hardware on the way.”

McWhitney nodded. “Good.”

They were interrupted by the waitress. The menu was printed on the paper place mats. They ordered things, and then McWhitney said, “I understand you met that guy Keenan.”

“Yes.”

“I take it he didn’t push you very hard.”

“Not hard,” Parker agreed. “He didn’t know anything, so he didn’t know where to reach for a handle.”

“Well, he made a grab at a handle when he came to me.”

Dalesia said, “Sounds as though he was desperate by then. Time going by, not getting anywhere, no profit in sight.”

McWhitney nodded. “I think he was in the wrong business,” he said.

Dalesia grinned. “Well, at the end he was.”

Their food came, and while they were eating it, McWhitney said to Parker, “Did Nick talk to you about some church somewhere?”

“He said the word ‘church,’” Parker said, “but he didn’t say what it meant.”

“Same with me,” McWhitney said. He turned his dissatisfied gaze toward Dalesia. “Look at him,” he said. “He looks exactly like somebody with a concealed full house.”

Dalesia was pleased with himself. “That’s just what I am,” he said.

They all traveled in Dalesia’s car, McWhitney in the backseat. Dalesia showed them the intersection first, where they would grab the armored car, and they both approved the choice. McWhitney, gesturing at the diner and the gas station, said, “These places are empty at night?”

“Nobody out here at all.”

Parker said, “I like the way it narrows down.”

“Let me show you where we go from here,” Dalesia said. “The car we want we’ll take out this way, to the right.” He drove less than half a mile, then stopped where a dirt road angled off to the left. “We stop the car here,” he said, “put the guards over on the dirt road there.”

Parker looked around. The area was hilly, the road twisty, with pine woods along the right and on part of the left. Just beyond the dirt road turnoff, a cornfield had finished its season and was turning into papyrus. “Not much traffic.”

“Don’t open a lemonade stand,” Dalesia advised, and drove them on.

West Ruudskill was seven miles farther. They didn’t stop, but Dalesia told McWhitney, “That’s our mill, where we’ll switch the cash from their armored car to our truck. Big wide doorway, solid floor.”

“Looks good,” McWhitney said, peering out the back window at it as they drove by. Facing front again, he said, “I guess, next it’s this church of yours.”

“Eleven miles from here,” Dalesia said. “All crap road, twisty, two-lane, but at least it’s all paved.”

They drove to the end of the road from West Ruudskill, and Dalesia took the left where it came to the T, then in a quarter mile another right; and a few miles later, after passing a few farms but mostly woods, he turned off on the right side at a small white clapboard church with a wooden steeple. Across the road was a narrow two-story white clapboard house with a broad porch around the lower floor. Both buildings had the look of long disuse.

“These country churches,” Dalesia said, pulling in at a weedy gravel area that would once have been a parking lot, “they’re losing their congregations, doubling up, nobody can afford to keep every one of these dinky things going any more.”

They got out of the car, and Dalesia said, “The power’s off, here and across the street. The line still comes in, so maybe we could start the electric if we needed to.”

“We shouldn’t need to,” Parker said.

“That’s what I figure.” Dalesia started off around the church, saying, “Let me show you what I like about this place.”

Around back, a large white-clapboard-sided lean-to had been attached to the rear of the church some time after the original construction. The slanted roof was gray asphalt tile, and the addition was completely open across the back, almost the full width of the church. The covered space was about ten feet from front to back. A few miscellaneous items were jumbled into a rear corner, but the rest of the dirt-floored space was clear.

“There’s bits of their old Christmas manger scene back there,” Dalesia said, pointing at the stuff in the corner. “They built this on for storage, I guess back when congregations were getting bigger instead of smaller. But you know what’s great about this?”

“The truck,” Parker said.

McWhitney smiled for the first time since Parker had met him. “We put it in sideways,” he said. “We cover it with a tarp, so there’s nothing shiny.”

“Run your helicopters,” Dalesia said. “Do what you want. We’re inside, safe and dry, and our stash, in the truck, is out here, invisible.” He grinned around at them, proud of his discovery. “Myself,” he said, “I’ve always been a churchgoer.”

3

Back at the family place for breakfast next morning, Dalesia was irritated. “I went home last night,” he said, “check on things. My signal was on that wasn’t supposed to be on. The person we had the missus send the fax to.”

Parker said, “She sent another fax.”

“To my intermediary contact,” Dalesia said, “who didn’t like that. And neither do I. I told the missus, at the beginning, lose that number.”

“They never do,” Parker said.

McWhitney paused with a lot of pancake halfway to his mouth to say, “You always have to go back and take it away from them.”

“That’s what we’re gonna do,” Dalesia said. He sounded grim.

Parker said, “She wants another meet.”

“Noon today, same place. Just one of us, she says.”

“Me,” Parker said.

Dalesia frowned at him. “Why you? It’s my message system.”

“She’s got you upset. I can stay calm and still get the number out of her.”

Dalesia wasn’t sure he liked that. “Or?”

Parker shrugged. “Or it turns out, she was afraid the cops were getting too close, coming in on her for shooting Jake, she didn’t see how she could go on.”

McWhitney said, doubtful, “She offs herself?”

“Only if she’s that stupid,” Parker said.

“With me she’d be that stupid,” Dalesia said. “Okay, Parker, you do it. Nels and me, we’ll get some bottled water, candy, shit like that, stash it in the church.”

At noon, Parker stood by his Lexus in the rest area parking lot as before, and here came the white Infiniti down the lane. He held up a hand to stop her, walked around the hood, and slid in on the passenger side.

Frowning at him, she said, “Aren’t we going in the restaurant?”

“You don’t want coffee. You bring that fax number with you?”

“Of course not, why would I do that?”

“Because my partner told you to get rid of it and you didn’t. So now you will. No copies, nothing.”

“I don’t see why it’s such a big deal,” she said. She hadn’t started driving yet, since Parker had climbed in.

“You don’t have to see,” he told her, and nodded at the windshield. “Drive on, don’t be conspicuous.”

“This isn’t the way it was supposed to be,” she said, but she put the Infiniti in gear and drove it through the parking area, a moving advertisement for milk.

“We can do it one of two ways,” Parker told her. “We can drive to your place, you go in and get the number, and any copies you made, and bring it out and give it to me. Or you can take me back to my car and I’ll go to your house myself and search a little.”

“Oh, my God, no.” The threat seemed to raise a host of horrible visions in her mind. “All right,” she said. “We’ll go there, I’ll get the number.”

“Along the way,” he said, “you can tell me what this meeting’s about.”

She frowned, not speaking, and steered them out of the rest area and eastward on the MassPike. Up to eighty, along with everybody else, she said, “The policewoman knows I did it.”

“You’re out walking around,” he said.

“She can’t prove I did it, but she knows I did it. She doesn’t know why. Jake’s tried to convince her it was because he wouldn’t come back to me, and that I wasn’t really trying to kill him, I was just trying to make him pay attention to me, but she isn’t sure she buys it. She isn’t dumb.”

“That’s too bad,” Parker said.

Elaine Langen gave him a quick sidelong glance. “Because I am?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “As soon as there’s a robbery, she’ll know Jake was lying, she’ll know we’re both involved.”

“As you say,” Parker said, “she can’t prove it.”

“Maybe she can.” Elaine Langen was very upset. “She’ll know it, and she’ll poke and pry, she’ll look for inconsistencies, she’ll question me and question me, and I don’t know if—”

“Don’t say that,” Parker said.

She looked at him, not understanding. “Don’t say what?”

“Don’t say you’ll cave in and tell this woman everything you know,” Parker told her. “Don’t say that to me, don’t say it to my partner, don’t even say it to Jake.”

“But I don’t—”

“Whichever one of us you say it to,” Parker interrupted, “will kill you.”

She swerved, the car jolting as she stared at him.

“Stay in your lane. You don’t want to attract a trooper.”

“No, I—” She controlled the car, but not herself. Leaning forward over the wheel, staring wide-eyed and openmouthed out the windshield, as though seeing some horror on the far horizon, she said, “How can you say that? How can you just say a thing like that?”

“Because it doesn’t have to happen. I’m giving you advice, Mrs. Langen. You’re in something very deep. It’s over your head out here. You gotta keep swimming. If you don’t keep swimming, you’re gonna drown. No use blaming me for it, or my partner, or Jake. You swim, or you drown.”

“You drown me.”

“Easily. You’re dead before you can worry about it.”

They had reached the exit. She steered the Infiniti down the ramp, and Parker pointed at a diner some distance away. “Pull into the parking lot there.”

“I’m afraid to stop.”

“I don’t have that fax number yet. Pull in.”

She pulled in, switching off the engine, and sat with both hands on the steering wheel, eyes fixed on the dashboard. “What now?”

“You were going to say,” Parker told her, “call it off, the cops are too close, they’re suspicious already, we can’t go through with it.”

Blazing up, forgetting to be terrified, she turned her head to glare at him, fingers clutching the wheel even tighter as she said, “That’s right! And it’s true, they are. They’re suspicious, they believe I shot Jake, they don’t really buy the reason Jake gave them, if this robbery happens they’ll know that’s the reason. They’ll just come after me. I don’t know how strong I am.”

Parker said, “Remember you decided, my partner and me, we’re good cop, bad cop?”

She didn’t follow. “Yes?”

“This woman cop you’ve got.”

“Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa.”

“Is she good cop or bad cop?”

“Good, at least so far. I mean, she’s on her own. So there is no bad cop.”

“Yes, there is,” Parker said. “Me.”

The look she gave him turned bleak.

Parker said, “Everything she says to you, every hour she spends on you, just keep reminding yourself. This is the good cop. The bad cop is out there, and he’s not very far away, and he doesn’t go for second chances.”

“I’m sure you don’t.” Her voice now was a whisper, as though all strength had been drained from her.

“The bad cop is nearby.”

She closed her eyes and nodded.

“Talk to the good cop all you want,” Parker said. “But always think about the bad cop.”

“I will.” Whispered again, this time almost a prayer.

“Good,” Parker said. “Let’s drive to your house, you can get me that fax number and drive me back to my car.”

She nodded, and started the engine.

As they moved out of the diner’s parking area, Parker said, “This is an Infiniti.”

“Yes.”

“That means forever.”

“Yes.”

“Seems worth going for,” he said.

She nodded, not looking at him. “Yes,” she said.

4

Jake’s mobile home was all cleaned up. No dishes in the sink, no clothes on the bedroom floor, no newspapers on top of the water closet. Having knocked once and gotten no response, Parker had let himself in, the flimsy lock on this structure offering not much of a challenge, and now there was nothing to do but settle down and wait.

There were books on a living room table that hadn’t been there before, most of them fantasies about life in medieval castles on other planets—the sister’s reading, it must be. Parker took one of them, read for a while, then stopped reading and merely waited.

He had come here direct from the meeting with Elaine Langen, Dalesia’s original note with his contact’s fax number now in Parker’s pocket. He had a couple of details to settle with Jake, which would have to be through the sister, and then he could go back to Trails End Motor Inne. And there wouldn’t be much to do after that but wait for Briggs to get here, and then the armored cars.

Before they’d separated, Parker had reminded Elaine Langen once more about the handover at the stop sign on the night, while the armored cars were being loaded, when she would let them know which one carried the cash. That was the last piece, and it seemed to him that the woman was cowed enough just to do her job and not make any more trouble.

He waited an hour and a half, and got to his feet when he heard the key in the lock. The sister walked in, looking busy and preoccupied, carrying a plastic bag with a drugstore’s name and logo on it. She saw him as she was closing the door, jolted, recovered, finished shutting the door, and said, “Well. You specialize in scaring the life out of me, don’t you?”

“I need,” Parker told her, “for you to take a message to Jake.”

“Not big on small talk,” she said, apparently to herself. Crossing past him, she said, “Let me put this stuff away. You want coffee?”

“No need.”

She went into the bathroom, came back out empty-handed, and said, “I get it, we’re not gonna be chums. Fine. What’s the message?”

“Wait a minute,” Parker said. “When was the last time you hung out with your brother?”

“Grammar school,” she said. “Why?”

“You’re here because he got shot,” Parker said. “You’re not here to be a hostess or something. We’re not gonna take tea together.”

She thought that over, nodding her head. “You’re right,” she decided. “If Jake wasn’t in the hospital, I’d never have met you in my life, and I wouldn’t miss the experience.”

“That’s right.”

“I have the idea,” she said, “he was involved with you and your friends in something he shouldn’t have been, and whoever shot him, I’m glad they did, because now he’s out of it, safe in the hospital.”

“That’s right,” Parker said. “But he can still help.”

“Not to get on the wrong side of the law all over again.”

“He can’t, in the hospital. But he can phone his motel, tell them we got another guy coming in a few days, same deal.”

“I suppose so,” she said, clearly not knowing what the deal was.

“And tell him, we won’t try to get in touch with him until he’s out of the hospital.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Fine.”

He turned away, but she said, “Wait one second, will you?”

He turned back. “Yeah?”

“There’s something I want to tell you,” she said.

“Go ahead.”

She waited, frowning, then abruptly said, “I don’t like Dr. Madchen.”

He watched her face. “You don’t like him?”

“He isn’t Jake’s doctor now, not while he’s in the hospital, but he’s hanging around anyway, and he’s making Jake nervous, and now he’s making me nervous.”

“In what way?”

“I take it,” she said, “he’s somehow part of what you people are doing, or connected with it somehow. And he’s like the nerd kid who just wants to hang around with the big boys, only he drops hints like how it’s really important to him that everything be okay and—”

“Hints?”

“Just to Jake, I think,” she said. “But I mean, in my presence. I guess he figures, I’m the sister, it’s safe. But he’s a needy guy, and he makes me nervous.”

“Thank you,” Parker said. “All of a sudden, he makes me nervous, too.”

“You’ll talk to him?”

“Yes.”

“And I’ll tell Jake what you said.”

“Good.”

She walked him to the door. “This Dr. Madchen,” she said, “I don’t mean he’s a bad guy or a threatening guy or anything like that. I just mean he’s drawing attention to himself because he’s so needy and uncomfortable.”

“I understand,” Parker said.

“So when you see him,” she suggested, “use your best bedside manner.”

5

A mile from Riviera Park, the rearview mirror in the Lexus showed Parker a battered old tan Plymouth Fury that tugged at his memory. It seemed to be pacing him, hanging two or three cars back in moderate traffic as he drove east across Massachusetts toward the motel. Early afternoon, the thin September sun not yet low enough to obscure his view back there. Who was that?

Elaine Langen’s house, when he’d gone there to get her gun. No other car parked outside when he arrived. The meeting with Mrs. Langen cut short because a “lady policeman” had come to the house. That tan Plymouth Fury parked next to his Lexus when he came around from the kitchen door and drove away.

So she recognized him, too. She was watching Jake’s place, to see what activity might take place there, or she had beat cops watching it. For whatever reason, she connected this Lexus to both the Langen house and Jake’s mobile home. And now she was following, waiting to see where he’d go next.

Nowhere with her. Parker made a few turns, accelerated, decelerated, put himself in positions where he could make abrupt turns across lanes of oncoming traffic, and without raising a sweat, she stayed with him. Sometimes she lost ground, but she never lost the Lexus.

He was just coming to the conclusion that the thing to do was find a railroad station. He could leave the Lexus, and take trains until he was alone, then rent a car and come back. But as he was thinking that, a graceful brown-leather covered arm—it reminded him of a ballerina’s arm move, starting a lift—came out of the driver’s door of the Plymouth and slapped a suction-cup red flasher on the roof.

No siren, but the flasher started its spinning crimson roll, and the bright beams of the Plymouth’s headlights flared alternately left and right, and she accelerated past the intervening cars—they dodged out of the way like rabbits from a coyote—and when she’d reached his rear bumper, a loud-hailer voice, so distorted you couldn’t tell if it was male or female, said, “Pull over on the shoulder.”

He did. The only ID he carried on him belonged to John B. Allen, and was safe. The registration in the glove compartment carried the name Claire Willis, who would be his married sister. There was no bad paper out on either name. If this cop didn’t happen to find the Beretta clipped under his seat—and why should she?—there was nothing in the car to cause him trouble.

He stopped, crunching on the gravel shoulder, and ignored the gawkers as they crept by. Instead, he watched the rearview mirror.

She took her time in there. He could see her, on her radio. Checking the license plate, maybe arranging for backup, if it should turn out to be needed. But then at last she did come out, a tall, slender blonde woman in tan slacks and a short leather car coat, and moved forward toward his car.

A cop walks like a cop. Even the woman cops do it. Women walk as though they have no center of gravity, as though they’re all waifs, or angels, but cops walk as though their center of gravity is in their hips, so they can be very still or very fast. To see that kind of body motion on a woman was strange, particularly on a good-looking blonde.

Parker rolled his window down and looked out at her. Very good-looking. Sure of herself because she was a cop and because she was good-looking. And good at her work—Parker hadn’t been able to lose her.

He said, “Yes, Officer?”

“May I see license and registration, please?”

“Sure. Registration in the glove compartment. Okay?”

She seemed surprised at the question. “Get it, please.” He handed her the documents, and she studied them, saying, “May I ask your occupation, Mr. Allen?”

Fortunately, he remembered what he’d told Elaine Langen that time: “Mostly,” he said, “I’m a landscape architect.”

She raised a brow. “Mostly?”

“Well, it’s seasonal work,” he said, having no idea whether it was or not, but figuring she wouldn’t know either. “The rest of the year, I do other things. Or nothing. Depends how the season went.”

“This is your wife’s car?”

“Sister. My Navigator’s in the shop.”

“And have you had work up in this area, Mr. Allen?”

“It’s done now,” he said. “It was just consultancy, for a Mrs. Langen. I’m not doing the project. You want her address? I have it somewhere.”

“Not needed. Just wait a moment,” she said, and took his license and registration away to her car.

She was curious about him. She knew, from Elaine Langen’s stupid move with the gun, from Jake Beckham, gunshot in a hospital—she knew something was in the air. And all of a sudden, she had the new guy in her territory, connected both to Elaine Langen and to Jake Beckham.

At this point, there was no way for the cop to get a handle on what was going down, but she was curious. She was going to poke; she was going to pry, and all because of Elaine Langen.

Two days. Two days from now this cop, and every other cop for five hundred miles, would know what was going down. Let them know. By then, it wouldn’t matter. Not to Parker, anyway.

She came back. “Mr. Allen, I wonder if you’d open your trunk.”

“Sure,” he said, and got out and did so. He waited till she was shining her flashlight in at the trunk, empty except for a folded sheet of blue tarpaulin, and then he said, “Is it all right to ask what this is all about?”

“Just a routine traffic check.”

He laughed at her. “You’ve been dogging me for fifteen miles. I tried to shake you, and I couldn’t.”

She looked at him, no expression. “Do you consider yourself good at shaking cars pursuing you?”

“I guess not.” He shrugged. “I never tried it before, and it didn’t work this time. But the thing is, Officer—”

“Detective,” she said. “Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa.”

“How do you do, Detective. The thing is, it’s pretty obvious you’re just after me, and since I don’t know anything I’m in trouble for, I’m wondering how come.”

Instead of answering, she said, “Thank you,” with a nod, meaning he could close the trunk; so he did, as she moved very slowly around the car, studying every inch of it. She was, he knew, looking for a violation, a broken light or something like that, so she could cite him and then possibly bring him in for further questioning. But there would be nothing to hook on to. He kept the Lexus clean.

Nevertheless, he realized, this car was through. When the detective finished her inspection, he would leave the Lexus, wiped down and key in ignition, in some store’s parking lot where he could walk to a car rental agency. And when he got back to the motel, he’d phone Claire to report the Lexus stolen, get a rental of her own, and think about what car she’d want next.

It was with obvious reluctance that Detective Reversa gave him back his license and registration. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

He nodded. He wouldn’t ask her again, because he knew she wouldn’t answer. He said, “Is that it?”

“Unless you have something you want to say?”

“Only, I’m glad I wasn’t on my way to an important appointment.”

Her smile was cold. “So am I, Mr. Allen.”

She didn’t follow him when he drove away from there, but she didn’t have to. She’d picked up whatever information she was going to pick up, and she knew it. And Parker had picked up a couple of things, too.

For instance, she hadn’t tried any names on him. “How do you know Mrs. Langen?” “What’s your relationship with Wendy Beckham?” “Do you happen to know Jake Beckham?” “What else are you doing in this part of the world, Mr. Allen?”

She hadn’t asked those questions. She should have, but she hadn’t, and he knew that meant she knew he’d lied to her.

She was going to be a problem.

6

At dinner in the same family restaurant, Parker told the other two about Wendy Beckham’s doubts about Dr. Madchen. Dalesia said, “I thought he was a jerk that first day in his office. Comes out with a folder, has to have a very important conference with the receptionist, at the same time he’s giving us the steady double-o.”

“I don’t mind if he’s curious,” Parker said. “I mind if he’s drawing attention. This woman cop on the case, this Reversa, she’s sharp, and she knows something’s happening, and she’s keeping an eye on everything that ripples anywhere around Jake.”

“So,” McWhitney said, “you mean we should stop this guy from rippling.”

“He’s seen Nick and me,” Parker said.

With a snort, Dalesia said, “And he’ll sure remember us.”

“A little later tonight,” Parker said, “we’ll go visit him and see if he can learn to control himself.”

“Good,” McWhitney said. “Save me for if it has to turn mean.”

Dr. Madchen’s home address was in the local phone book, and when Parker and Dalesia got there at nine-thirty that night, the neighborhood was a surprise. “He didn’t get this from pushing pills,” Dalesia said.

It was true. This had to be one of the richest neighborhoods anywhere around here. Large old houses set well back from the road commanded acres of rolling lawns and many specimen trees and well tended hedges. The few cars visible down the long driveways were recent and expensive.

This was a hard place to move around in without being noticed. There was nowhere nearby to leave the car, and it wasn’t a neighborhood where people did a lot of walking, particularly at night.

They were in Dalesia’s Audi. Parker’s new rented Dodge Stratus would stay mostly out of sight. The second time they approached the doctor’s address, Parker said, “Let me out, circle back for me. I’ll see what’s the situation.”

There was very little traffic along these curving roads, none of them major streets from anywhere to anywhere, just ribbons laid out on a field of emerald green. The tall streetlights were soft, and so were the private lights defining driveways and entrances. At the moment, there wasn’t another moving vehicle in sight. Parker left the Audi and walked in along Dr. Madchen’s blacktop drive in a faint, pervasive amber glow that made everything visible but nothing easy to focus on.

The Madchen house was brick, probably a century old, three stories high. Elaborate white woodwork surrounded all the doors and windows, and a large, empty wooden porch crossed the front, looking as though no one had used it since the invention of air-conditioning.

Not trusting the old wood floor of the porch to be silent, Parker moved around the house to the right, where he saw lights in windows. Moving slowly but steadily, keeping a few feet back from the windows, he passed along the right side of the house.

First a living room, brightly lit but empty. Then a dining room, where a uniformed Asian maid finished loading a round silver tray with dinner things and carried it away through a dark wood swinging door. Then a smaller room with darker furniture and walls, and a blue-lit woman not quite facing the window Parker peered through.

He stopped. The woman was fiftyish, heavyset, with too-black hair. She was seated deep in a soft broadcloth armchair, and wore a lumpy satin robe or muumuu with Hawaiian island scenes repeated on it. She was barefoot, her feet on a hassock. She gazed forward, discontented, brooding. The television set she glowered at, its sound rising dimly and disjointedly through the window, was out of Parker’s sight, below and just to his right of the window.

He watched her for a minute. The Asian maid entered and asked something respectful, folding her hands at her waist like a character in a movie. Without looking away from the screen, the woman said something sour. The maid nodded, crossed to pick up the squat empty glass from beside her mistress, and carried it out of the room. The woman abruptly called something after her, still without looking away from the television set. Parker thought he made out the word “ice.”

The maid didn’t immediately return. Parker retraced his steps back to the road. Three minutes later, when Dalesia arrived, Parker went around to the driver’s side. When Dalesia lowered his window, Parker bent to say, “He isn’t home. Just a wife and a maid. Keep circling, I’ll wait for him, see what we do.”

“Fine.” Dalesia nodded generally at the neighborhood. “You know,” he said, “along about the second week, I bet this gets boring.”

An hour and a half later, a car came slowly down the road, its right blinker switched on. There was no other car anywhere in sight. This had to be the doctor.

Parker waited, leaning against the plump specimen tree shaped like a lollipop, with maroon leaves, that stood off to the left of the driveway, midway between road and house. The oncoming car’s lights flashed over him as the car turned in, but he doubted he’d been seen. The doctor’s night vision would be limited to what he expected to see along this well-known route.

As the car moved slowly toward the house, Parker stepped away from the tree and crossed the lawn to intercept it. The doctor, alone in the car, holding the steering wheel with both hands, was miles deep in his own thoughts and wasn’t aware of anything else until Parker tapped his side window. Then he jolted away, slamming on the brakes, barely stopping himself from thudding his forehead against the windshield.

Parker patted the air downward: calm down. Then he lifted a finger: wait.

Dr. Madchen stared at him in terror as Parker walked around the front of his Alero and got into the passenger seat. “Back out of here,” he said.

“What are you—why is the—what are you—”

Parker tapped a knuckle on the doctor’s kneecap; not hard, just enough to draw his attention. “Back out of here,” he said.

“You’re not supposed to—we’re not supposed to know—”

Parker said, “Well, this would be easier,” and brought the Beretta out of his pocket, not pointing it anywhere in particular.

“No! I don’t want to die!”

“Then you’ll back out of here.” Finally the doctor got the idea. Shaking, clumsy, he managed to shift the Alero into reverse and jump on the accelerator.

“Easy.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Back around to the right and stop.”

The sight of the pistol had calmed the doctor wonderfully. He backed out of the driveway and around to the right, stopping along the low curb. There were no sidewalks here.

“Put it in neutral.”

The doctor did that, too, then turned a very earnest face toward Parker. “I don’t want to die,” he explained, as though there might have been some question.

“That’s good,” Parker said. Bending down a bit, he saw, in the right side mirror, headlights approach. Putting the Beretta away, he opened his window and waved his arm. Dalesia drove by, and Parker said, “We’ll follow him.”

The doctor put the Alero in gear. “I don’t see—I don’t see why—”

“We’ll talk when we’re all together.”

Dalesia drove them away from that expensive neighborhood, into the nearby commercial neighborhood that’s always to be found in an area like that. It included an all-night supermarket, a glaring bubble of fluorescent light in the darkness. Dalesia turned in at the parking lot there, and the doctor followed. Dalesia parked some distance from the store, and Parker said, “Stop to his left.”

“All right.”

“Shut off the engine.”

“I haven’t done anything wrong.”

Dalesia got out of the Audi and slid into the back seat of the Alero. “You’ve been a naughty boy,” he told the doctor.

The doctor twisted halfway around in the seat, face distorted. “No, I haven’t! I did everything Jake asked me to do, I’m willing to do whatever.”

“You’re hanging around the hospital,” Parker told him. “You don’t have a job there.”

“He’s my patient, I want to be sure.”

“He’s not your patient now. You come in there,” Parker said, “and you act like a little boy with a secret. You talk to Jake about what’s happening—”

“No, no, I wouldn’t!”

“You hint about what’s happening. You hint in front of his sister. Who else do you hint in front of?”

“Nobody! No one! I swear, I wouldn’t— I need this! I need it, you don’t understand, the life I live, I need this, I don’t want to die—”

“I got that,” Parker said.

“I don’t want to die,” the doctor said, more calmly. This time, it was a humble statement, as though he were asking permission. “If this doesn’t happen,” he told them, “this thing you two are doing, if this thing doesn’t happen, I’m going to die.”

Parker watched him. “You are?”

“I can’t live. This is my last, you’re my last hope.”

Parker and Dalesia shared a glance. Dalesia said, “So you don’t want to louse things up.”

“No! No! Anything but!”

Parker said, “Stay away from the hospital.”

“I will,” the doctor said. “I hadn’t realized, but you’re right, you’re absolutely right, I—”

“Stay away from Jake,” Parker said.

“I will. I promise.”

“No more hints.”

“No.”

“No more hanging around.”

“No.”

“Not a word out of you to anybody.”

“No,” the doctor said, and sat up straighter, and crossed his heart and held his right hand up like a Boy Scout. “I swear to God,” he said. “Hope to die.”

7

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

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

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

“What about her?”

“Describe her to me.”

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

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

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

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

“You? Why does she even know you?”

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

“Where did you see her?”

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

“Sure.”

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

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

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

“You’re sure it’s the same woman.”

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

“You can’t.”

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

“Makes no sense,” Parker said.

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

“I don’t get it,” Parker admitted.

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

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

“Be my guest.”

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

“That links us pretty tight.”

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

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

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

“Do your drugstore run again.”

“Fine.”

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

“She’ll show up.”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

8

We don’t need this,” Dalesia said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Christ on a crutch,” McWhitney said.

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

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

Parker said, “But he didn’t use it.”

“He didn’t get the chance.”

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

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

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

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

Dalesia laughed. “You sure did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9

The phone rang. Parker opened his eyes, and the LED readout on the bedside clock radio read 2:17. The red numbers also gave enough light so he could see the phone. He unhooked it, put it between pillow and ear while he looked around to be sure nothing had changed since he’d switched the lights out, and said, “Yes.”

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

“Of course I’ll bring a gun.”

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

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

“I don’t leave home without it.”

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

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

“I’ll be there.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dalesia said, “You need another Roy Keenan.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“God damn it,” McWhitney said.

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

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

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

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

Parker said, “What difference does that make?”

“I just want to know.”

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

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

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

“Drugs,” Dalesia said.

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

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

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

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

“No,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, yeah.”

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

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

10

The next day was Friday, and that night the bank would move, so the bank people would have the whole weekend to get everything into its new position. Which meant that today Parker and Dalesia and McWhitney would also make their move.

When the three went out for lunch in Dalesia’s Audi early that afternoon, there were two guys in warmup jackets closing the pool, disassembling the ladders and the board while the clear water glinted a goodbye at the sunless white sky. When they came back, a little before three in the afternoon, a gray cover like a trampoline, its segments stitched together with thick seams, spread across the rectangle of the pool inside its low chain-link fence, and around back a Honda Accord, the same shade of gray as the pool cover, stood just beyond the rented Dodge.

Dalesia drove past it, toward his own room, and Parker saw that there was someone seated at the wheel of the Honda: Wendy Beckham. “Something,” he said.

Dalesia looked at his rearview mirror. “Something?”

“Jake’s sister. I’ll see what it is.”

Dalesia parked, and they got out, McWhitney saying, “I don’t want any more problems.”

“I’ll tell her,” Parker said.

Dalesia said, “We’ll still be ready to go in ten minutes, right?”

“If not, I’ll call your room.”

McWhitney said, “I’m starting to wipe my room down now, and when I’m done, I want to go. I don’t want to stand around with my hands in my pockets, afraid to leave a print somewhere.”

“I’ll see what she wants,” Parker said, and went away from them, over to where Wendy Beckham had gotten out of her car and stood now on the concrete walk in front of it. She was looking past him at the other two, now going into their rooms, and she looked worried.

Parker said, “A message from Jake?”

“A message from me,” she said, and now instead of worried she looked angry. “Jake finally told me what’s going on.”

“That was stupid,” Parker said. “What did he do that for?”

“Because he noticed, very late in the day,” she said, “that he’s the one gonna be left holding the bag.”

He said, “You want to talk out here, or in the room?”

“Out here,” she said.

“Because . . .”

“Because I’m here to tell you, the deal’s off.”

He frowned at her. “What deal’s off?”

“The robbery,” she said. “The armored car with all the cash from the bank. The bank, God help us, that Jake used to work for. You aren’t going to rob it. You aren’t going to take it.”

He said, “Why not?”

“Because you’re all staying here, at Jake’s motel.” She was really very angry. “He’s still the same irresponsible clown he always was,” she told him. “You people will go, you’ll get away with it or you’ll be killed by the guards in the armored car, but whatever happens to you people, he’s in trouble again.”

“I don’t see that,” Parker said. “We aren’t registered here, under any names at all.”

“Don’t you think the maids will talk?” she demanded. “Don’t you think the people that work here already know there’s something funny going on? Three guys staying here without management knowing about it, three guys disappear, all of a sudden three guys rob an armored car. No, they won’t catch up with you, but how long will it take them to get here?”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Parker said. “They might even think Jake had something to do with it, because he’s an ex-con, but every ex-con in this part of the state will be under suspicion and so what? Jake’s in the hospital, legitimately in the hospital. He doesn’t know anything about anything. They can suspect whatever they want, but how are they gonna prove anything?”

“You’re here, in his motel.”

“He doesn’t know a thing about it. Somebody pulled a fast one while he was away in the hospital. Besides, it isn’t his motel, he’s on staff here, he’s an assistant manager.”

She shook her head. “The minute the police start leaning on people here,” she said, “the truth will come out, and Jake will go back to jail, and the worst thing is, you know that.”

No, the fact was, Parker didn’t care. Jake would find his own way out of the jam, or not. He said, “It’s too late to stop it. It’s going to happen, so you better tell Jake it’s time to start practicing his poker face.”

“I’ll stop you,” she said. She was wide-eyed, body clenched with determination.

He studied her. “How do you figure to do that?”

“I’ll go to the police! I’ll tell them everything, I’ll tell them what you plan to do.”

Parker shook his head. “I wouldn’t have believed it,” he said. “You’re dumber than your brother.”

She was offended, but also involved. “What do you mean?”

“There’s one guy in this group,” Parker told her, “that doesn’t spend a lot of his time thinking things through. I could walk you down there to his room, knock on the door, have you tell him what you just told me, and he’d kill you right then. Wouldn’t even think about it, just drop you.”

She blinked, but remained defiant. “Well, I’m not telling him,” she said, taking a step backward, away from him and toward her car. “I’m telling you, you’re the one I know, and you’re the only one I have to tell.”

Parker said, “The reason it’s better to tell me than this other guy is, I take a minute to think about it. I take a minute and I think, what is she gonna tell the cops? Does she know when or where or how we’re gonna do it? No. Does she know who we are when we’re at home? No. The only thing she can do is blow the whistle on her brother, so instead of maybe he’s in trouble definitely he’s in trouble, and you did it.”

He waited, watching her eyes, as she went from defiant to frightened to something like desperate. Then he said, “You want to talk to the cops, go ahead. Don’t worry about us. I gotta pack now. Goodbye.”

FOUR

1

Dalesia left the Trails End first, followed a few minutes later by McWhitney, and a few minutes after that by Parker, who drove out past the covered swimming pool just around the time Wendy Beckham sat down in the hospital room with her brother to try to figure out how to keep him out of trouble, now that Jake’s bad companions had announced they were not going to cancel their robbery.

“I’m sorry I told you,” Jake said. He was sulky, and getting bored in the hospital bed.

“Unless I can think of something to get you out of this,” Wendy told him, “so am I.”

And they sat together in grim silence. This was the first day Jake’s leg was out of the sling and he could sit up normally, but he wasn’t even allowed to enjoy that.

When Parker got to the old mill in West Ruudskill, Dalesia and McWhitney had already driven their cars across the old, littered concrete floor, lumpy and powdering beneath their tires as they circled around rusted pieces of machinery, rolls of wire, moldering stacks of cartons, until they’d reached as deep into the building as they could drive. From the broad open entrance at the other end of the place, long since stripped of its huge metal sliding doors, they were invisible back here.

Now they had nothing to do until Dalesia would drive off to meet Briggs at the motel at six. The inside of the old brick building was colder than the outside air, so they went out a squeaking side door to the remains of an old iron bench on a concrete platform over the stream. There they sat or paced, and saw that the white sky was not going to clear today. Heavy cloud cover or even rain could only be an advantage to them tonight.

Across the way they could occasionally, not often, hear a passing vehicle approach and cross the bridge, but where they were, the bushes and trees screened them from the road, and they could neither see nor be seen.

This was a dead time, nothing to do. Even McWhitney didn’t feel like talking, though at one point he did say, “What do we do if your friend Briggs doesn’t show up?”

“We go home,” Parker said.

McWhitney looked at him. He’d clearly been expecting some endorsement of Briggs. Not getting it, he realized he hadn’t needed it. So he nodded, and looked out at the quick stream, and said nothing else.

While they were out there, in the last of the day’s thin warmth, one hundred sixty miles to the east, in Chelsea, just north of Boston, behind an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence, four armored cars were finishing their prep. The company was Harbor Coin Services, and the cars had all been bought used and were then refurbished. They were all the International Navistar Armored Truck model 4700, more or less the standard of the industry. They had been manufactured in America in the late eighties or early nineties and were as good as ever. The reinforced metal box that was their reason for being did not weaken or grow old. The parts that did, the engines and transmissions and brakes and the rest of it, could be repaired or rebuilt or replaced, but the metal box remained solid.

Each car held a crew of three: a driver and a guard riding shotgun in the front compartment, and a guard with his own fold-down seat in the sealed-away rear compartment. A shatterproof glass panel between the two compartments could be slid open for communication, but otherwise the wall between front and rear sections was as thick and tough as the outer walls.

The four trucks, their bodies painted red and hoods black, went through the company car wash as the final step in their preparation for the night’s work, and then lined up behind the chain-link fence, awaiting departure time. The twelve men of their crews had an early dinner, without beer or wine, and got to Harbor Coin Services at six-thirty, ready to roll.

At six-thirty, Dalesia got into his Audi and maneuvered it back out of the building, on his way to meet Briggs, who was supposed to arrive at the motel at seven. He would be taking over Dalesia’s room, and then Dalesia would lead Briggs and his van back to the mill. An evening chill had settled in, so after Dalesia left, Parker and McWhitney moved back inside, sitting in the Dodge, Parker in front, McWhitney in back.

The four armored cars lumbered like costumed circus elephants out of the Harbor Coin secure area onto city streets until they reached the Northeast Expressway. They took that west, over the Mystic-Tobin bridge to Interstate 93, and then took 93 and 95 in the long loop south and west and north around Boston and up to Interstate 90, which would take them across the state. They couldn’t make much time in this early part of the drive, because the Boston area roads were full, but once they got west of Newton, the traffic thinned out enough so they could get into a line in the right lane and do a steady sixty-five while all the traffic around them snapped by at eighty.

Dalesia came back at ten to seven, trailed by a dark green Ford Econoline van with Florida plates. Briggs, when he got out of the van, looked as fussy and dissatisfied as ever, but offered no complaints beyond saying, “Long drive.” He was still neat, though, in white dress shirt open at the collar, a tan zippered cotton windbreaker hanging open, and dark gray work pants. He looked like an office-machine repairman.

Briggs and Dalesia and Parker had worked together some years before, in the failed job that had led Briggs to opt for retirement, but Briggs and McWhitney were now meeting for the first time. Dalesia made the introductions, and Briggs and McWhitney shook hands while eyeing each other with some skepticism. Both were generally dissatisfied people, in different ways, and couldn’t be expected to take to each other right away.

While Briggs and McWhitney were sizing each other up, Wendy Beckham was leaving the hospital, fretful, no closer than before to figuring out how to save her brother from his own carelessness. And Elaine Langen was on her way from home down to the former bank headquarters in Deer Hill. Her husband had been there all day, working with Bart Hosfeld, the professional who’d been hired to be in charge of the move, but Elaine only had to be there for the part she dreaded most, which was the farewell dinner.

The Deer Hill branch would continue as a bank, a part of Rutherford Combined Savings, but it would now be a Rutherford bank branch in the old-fashioned marble space of the bank building’s main floor. The former Deer Hill Bank offices upstairs would be rented to other concerns, one of which would pay for the right to rename the building after itself.

For tonight, however, a different kind of transition would be taking place. For tonight only, the marble hall of the Deer Hill Bank, with its high ceiling and glittering chandeliers installed back in the twenties, was going to be a banquet hall.

Caterers were even now wheeling in round tables, chairs, tablecloths, place settings for eighty, and a wheeled rostrum for speeches, and the branch manager’s office tonight would be the caterer’s base of operations, with warming ovens and portable refrigerators and many trays lined with canapés.

At eight tonight, old-line bank employees and important local citizens would gather in this original branch of Deer Hill Bank to say farewell to that bank and to watch it be eaten in one giant gulp by Rutherford Combined. Speeches would be made, maudlin and tedious. Promises would be made, never to be kept. Memories would be stirred with many boring anecdotes of the old days of Deer Hill and the sweet little bank that kept the town going through thick and thin, mostly thin. Elaine’s father, Harvey, would be remembered in ways that would make him unrecognizable.

It was going to be absolute hell, but longer. Elaine took a Valium with scotch and drove south, telling herself that at least the ending of tonight’s activities would be a surprise for those pompous bastards.

When Briggs opened the side door of his van, they looked in at five long, lumpy rolls of thin army blankets, tied in two places each with clothesline. In addition to those, looking like too-small body bags, there were three liquor cartons in there that had been opened and reclosed.

“Let me show you these things,” Briggs said, considering which one he wanted to bring out first, actually squeezing one to feel what was inside. Making his choice, he pulled it closer and started to untie the lengths of clothesline. McWhitney, sounding suspicious, said, “These things aren’t new?”

“Oh, no,” Briggs said. “You’ll never get a new one, they’re much too controlled for that. They have to get out into the world, where they can be stolen and sold and lost and borrowed and mixed up in the paperwork.” Now unrolling the blanket, he said, “These have all been reconditioned. I don’t know if any of them has ever been fired, except maybe in practice. Mostly, you know, particularly when they’re owned by governments, these items are mostly for show.”

The last of the blanket was rolled back, and there was the 84mm Carl-Gustaf. Fifty-one inches long, grayish-tan metal, it was blunt and unlovely, a thick length of plain pipe that flared out like a megaphone at the butt. There were two pieces of wood attached, one under the trigger guard and the other screwed to a metal strap near the front.

“You load it here,” Briggs said, and snapped open the cone at the rear, which was hinged to the left. “It’s all normal,” he told them, and shut the weapon again. “There are three sights, open here, telescopic here, which I don’t think you’re going to need, and infrared here.”

“That we’ll use,” McWhitney said. “Let me heft the thing.”

“Of course.”

Briggs handed the weapon to McWhitney, who hefted it and said, “Heavy.”

“Thirty-six pounds,” Briggs told him. “Six pounds more with the rocket in it.”

McWhitney shook his head. “I don’t want to have to fire this thing more than once.”

Dalesia, grinning, said, “It’s all in the aim, Nels.”

McWhitney opened the butt again, raised the weapon to his face, and sniffed. Briggs said, “It won’t smell.”

“Oil,” McWhitney said.

“They’re reconditioned,” Briggs told him. “As I said.”

Parker said, “What else have you got in there? The rockets are in those boxes?”

“Yes, but let me show you the rifle I got.”

Parker said, “You said Valmets.”

“Yes, but I got something else,” Briggs said, feeling through the rolled blankets, making another choice. As he untied the clothesline, he said, “The problem with the Valmet, I could only get the M-sixty, not the M-sixty-two, and you don’t want that.”

McWhitney said, “Why not?”

“The Finnish army, it’s cold up there,” Briggs told him, “they use thick gloves, so the M-sixty doesn’t have a trigger guard. You don’t want that.”

Parker said, “So what are we getting instead?”

“The Colt Commando.”

Dalesia said, “An American gun?”

“That’s right, developed for Vietnam. It’s a short version of the M-16, and it’s light, and you won’t be worrying about long-range accuracy anyway, so it’s fine for you.”

Dalesia said, “I’ve seen these before.”

“Sure you have.” Opening the blanket, Briggs said, “The middle section is the same as the M-16, but the barrel’s only ten inches instead of twenty, and the butt’s only four inches long. There’s an extender in the butt you can pull out to make it seven inches long if you’re going to do shoulder-firing, which I don’t think you are.”

McWhitney said, “The front of the barrel is threaded. What’s that for?”

“There’s a lot of muzzle flash,” Briggs told him, “because of the short barrel, so you can attach a four-inch-long flash hider on the front. You don’t care about that, that’s just for somebody who wants to keep his location hidden at night. This way, it’s the shortest it gets.”

“I think we need to practice with these things,” Dalesia said. “Not shooting them, handling them.”

As they unwrapped the rest of the weapons, some miles away Elaine Langen arrived at her party and was met by her husband’s undisguised jubilation. “It’s a wonderful night, Elaine,” he said, standing there in a tux, which really did look very good on him. “It’s so much better to close this chapter with a grand party, don’t you think, than some cold banker’s farewell.”

“Oh, I think it’ll be a cold bankers’ party,” she said, and went off to find the bar.

A more subdued party, if perhaps more honestly joyful, was taking place three miles north of the former Deer Hill Bank, in a room at the Green Man Motel, where Dr. Myron Madchen had brought his special friend Isabelle Moran and a bottle of champagne with which to toast the beginning of their new lives together, lives that were being fashioned for them this very night. Isabelle had brought the glasses, the Brie, and the crackers, which she opened while the doctor opened the champagne, very carefully, as he always did.

A little later, he opened Isabelle’s clothing just as carefully, because she was still swathed in white bandage around her torso below the breasts, to give support to a two-week-old broken rib caused by the violent husband. The last broken rib he would ever inflict on Isabelle; they drank to that, too.

And then they made love, very carefully, the doctor choosing the positions with great delicacy so as not to interfere with the healing of her rib. He was considerate, and he was knowledgeable, and she was grateful, which she demonstrated in a number of ways.

Once the armaments had been unloaded from Briggs’s van, Dalesia drew him a map to show the route back to Trails End Motor Inne, and Briggs shook hands all around.

“I’ll be in touch,” Parker said.

“Good hunting,” Briggs told them all, then got into his van, backed away to where he could turn around, and drove out of there.

Everything was now on the concrete factory floor: the guns lying atop their blankets, the rockets and the Commando ammunition still in their liquor boxes. McWhitney stooped to pick up one of the Commandos and sight along it, aiming at the driver’s door on his pickup. “It would be nice,” he said, cheek against the metal of the gun, “if they’d see these things and just fold the hand. Give it up. Open the doors, get out of the way.”

Dalesia said, “Never happen. Everybody’s gotta be a hero for just one second. Then they fold like a beach chair, but first they gotta make you go that one step too far. That way, they can think back on it without being embarrassed about themselves.”

“The only thing they can do that’s really stupid,” Parker said, “is try to shoot at us.”

“Shoot at us, you mean,” McWhitney said. “You’re gonna be in the police car.”

“It’s still stupid,” Parker said.

In another room in the Green Man Motel, down the hall from Dr. Madchen and his love, Sandra Loscalzo came in from her early solitary dinner and immediately switched on her scanners. She would now pick up any police radio transmission anywhere within twelve miles of here.

Those guys had wanted two days to finish whatever it was they were doing. She was interested in that. Without endangering herself, there might be a way to include herself into whatever was about to go down.

Sandra had once heard a definition of a lawyer that she liked a lot. It said: “A lawyer is somebody who finds out where money is going to change hands, and goes there.” It was a description with speed and solidity and movement, and Sandra identified with it. She wasn’t a lawyer, but she didn’t see why she couldn’t make the concept work for her.

In her room at the Green Man, among her scanners, the night blossomed with police calls. Prowlers, domestic disputes, drunken drivers, heart attacks, rowdy teenagers in parks and playgrounds, fights in bars. None of them were her three guys. Not yet.

The sequence at the Deer Hill Bank party was first cocktails and shmoozing until eight, then dinner, then the speeches. Elaine Langen got just drunk enough in the initial phase of the evening to have no appetite for the second, so she ate practically nothing of dinner. However, with the prospect of the speeches still out in front of her, she did keep on drinking.

Wendy couldn’t be physically present in the hospital after visiting hours, but she could phone Jake and did, after tidying the mobile home and eating her frugal dinner. “Jake,” she started, “I’ve been thinking.”

“Don’t,” Jake said. He’d been thinking, too, and every thought he had led directly to a dead end. A solid wall. A black hole.

“No, listen, Jake,” she said. “You and me, we’ve had our differences over the years, but we’re still brother and sister, we can still take care of each other.”

“Oh, yeah, I’m fine.”

“The first thing you don’t want to do,” she told him, “is that. No giving up.”

He made a face at the blank television screen. Maybe there was something he could watch there after all. “Yeah?”

“What you want to do tomorrow,” she advised him, “when they come around, you just deny everything.”

“That’s what I figured to do. If they come around.”

“They will, Jake. And when they do, no matter what they say, no matter what anybody at the motel says, you just deny it all.”

“There’s only two people at the motel,” he said, “you know, that could be, whatever, and I trust those people.”

“You’re a trusting man, Jake,” she said. “That’s a good quality in you, but sometimes it can get you in trouble. You know what I mean.”

“Let me go on trusting them, all right? As long as I can, let me go on trusting somebody.”

“You can trust me, Jake,” she said. “Listen, this is a terrible thing that’s happening, but if it has to happen this is a good time for it. I’ve got good money from the beast”—her unaffectionate term for her ex—“and tomorrow morning I’ll go out first thing and get you a lawyer. A good lawyer.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t do that first, then they wonder, how come you got a lawyer already before anybody came around?”

“Oh,” she said. “All right. But as soon as you need a lawyer, trust me, I can pay for a good one.”

“Thank you, Wendy.”

“Maybe he can do some sort of plea bargain for you,” she said. “If you know useful stuff on those guys.”

“Useful stuff?”

“Jake,” she said, “you want as little jail time as you can possibly—”

“I don’t want any jail time!” His heart was suddenly pounding so loudly he could hear it in his ears, as though it were coming through the telephone.

“Well, we can hope,” she said. “But just to look at the possibilities, you are going to get charged, Jake. I mean, let’s be realistic here. You are gonna get charged.”

“Oh, Jesus.”

“We’ll get you a good lawyer, you cooperate, we’ll get you back out in no time.”

“Wendy, don’t.”

“I’m staying right here, Jake. We’ll see this through together. Get a good night’s sleep now.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Make them give you a pill. Jake? I mean it. Make them give you a pill.”

“I will,” he said.

“Okay. We’ll talk in the morning. Good night, Jake.”

“Yeah.”

He broke the connection, and he did ask for a pill, and they gave him one. Then he lay on his back in the dim room and stared at the ceiling.

Before this, he’d been worried. Now he was terrified.

Briggs spent half an hour in Dalesia’s former room at Trails End, but felt restless and couldn’t sit still. He kept walking around the room, opening the door to look out at the traffic rolling on the MassPike, going into the bathroom to critically inspect his face and conclude, yet again, that he didn’t need to shave at the moment, and in general behaving like something caged in the zoo.

It was the job those three were on; that’s what had agitated him. He’d been away from that business a long time, and he’d forgotten the rush it involved, the sense that, for just a little while, you were living your life in italics. You weren’t really aware of it when it was happening to you, but Briggs had seen it in Parker and Dalesia and the other one, and he’d found himself envying, not the danger or the risk or even the profit, but that feeling of heightened experience. A drug without drugs.

Half an hour was all he could stand, and then he said the hell with it; he didn’t have to stay here; he could do whatever he wanted. He wasn’t even checked in, so he wouldn’t have to check out.

He packed the stuff he’d unpacked thirty minutes earlier, wiped the room down just in case, left the card key on the bedside table, and went out to the van. His one bag went in where all the weaponry had been transported, and he got behind the wheel and headed south, taking an underpass beneath the MassPike. Forty-five minutes later he was on Interstate 95, which would run him down the entire U.S. Atlantic coast to Florida. He figured, when he grew tired, he’d find a motel. Maybe in Maryland.

Not long after leaving Trails End, Briggs had passed an upscale restaurant out in the country, where Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, her tour done for the day, was having dinner with her friend. These days, Gwen was dating a lawyer. Well, it beat dating a cop. Somehow, in your off-duty hours, you needed to be with somebody you could talk to who would understand your language, your references, your assumptions. That was why actors dated actors, doctors dated doctors, mathematicians dated mathematicians.

Gwen had dated a couple of cops, but male cops just couldn’t seem to get up to speed when it came to independent women. They would open the door for you, if they had to break your leg to get to it. They would protect you; they would make your decisions for you; they would explain for you how the world worked; and it would never occur to them they were patronizing, condescending bastards who should count themselves lucky Gwen kept a lock on her carry sidearm when off duty. They would condescend even when talking about the job, as though a person of either gender could make it to detective second grade without knowing the first thing about the work she was doing.

So a lawyer was better than that. Barry Ridgely, criminal defense attorney, attractive, good dresser, forty-one, divorced, two kids in private school, no real bad habits. Gwen had, naturally, checked him out when they’d first started seeing each other, and he was fine. He liked good restaurants, and so did she. He liked shoptalk, and so did she. It was just fine.

Tonight, Gwen’s shoptalk was all about the man whose name, she was pretty sure, was not John B. Allen. “He just didn’t look right,” she said, not for the first time. “You know how people look right in their jobs, or they don’t look right?”

“I know what you mean,” Barry said. The restaurant was half full but quiet, dim-lit, comfortable. He said, “I got a guy right now, veterinarian, strangled his wife. He looks like a veterinarian, you know? Caring, easygoing, patient.”

“But he strangled his wife.”

“She wasn’t a pet. I tell you, Gwen, if I could bring a puppy into that courtroom, I’d get my guy off in a New York minute.”

Gwen laughed and said, “Let me tell you about my landscape designer.”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt.” Which was one of the many nice things about him.

“That’s okay,” she told him, because it was. “I love the image of the puppy in court. But my guy, in the Lexus, is no landscape designer. You look at him, he could be a prison guard, he could be a mine worker. He isn’t outdoors, he isn’t saying, ‘Put the petunias over there.’ He just isn’t.”

Barry nodded. “Then why’d he say he was?” he asked, and put some monkfish in his mouth so he wouldn’t interrupt her any more.

“He was at Elaine Langen’s house when I interviewed her,” Gwen told him. “Not in the house, outside it. I didn’t see him then, but that’s when I saw his car, the Lexus. She’s the one said he was a landscape designer.” She stopped, considering that. “That’s right, she’s the one lied first, then he told the same lie when I stopped him, later on. And since then he’s disappeared, I asked some people on the force, unofficially, you know, keep an eye out for the Lexus, it hasn’t been seen since.”

“You said it was Jersey plates,” Barry pointed out, and poured them both some more chardonnay. “Maybe he went home.”

“Or maybe he’s lying low,” she said. “If he isn’t a landscape designer, and I know damn well he isn’t, then what’s he doing here, what’s he doing with Elaine Langen, and why are they both lying about it?”

“Hanky-panky?”

“No,” she said, sure of that. “She would, with anything in pants, but not him. He’s a cold guy. With me, when I stopped him, he wore this affability like a coat, it wasn’t him.”

“The cloak of invisibility,” Barry suggested.

“Exactly. Who knows who he is, down in there?”

“Well, if he’s still around,” Barry said, “and if he still has something to do with Mrs. Langen, you’ll find him.”

“Is he connected to my gunshot victim? I wonder,” Gwen said. “You know, the guy I told you about in the hospital.”

“A farmer boyfriend of Mrs. Langen.”

“Who may have shot him, I don’t know yet. But she and this Allen guy.” Gwen shook her head. “I just have the feeling, whatever those two are up to, and it isn’t hanky-panky, it would be very interesting to find out.”

“You’ll find out,” he told her. “I know you, you’re a bulldog.”

“Thanks, Barry,” she said, grinning comfortably at him. “Tell me about this veterinarian of yours. Why’d he strangle his wife?”

A little north of where they sat, in the restaurant that was only a restaurant for tonight, Elaine Langen, having not eaten her dinner and not drunk her coffee, but definitely having drunk her scotch and her wine, saw that the speeches were about to begin, and murmured to her husband, Jack, at her left hand, “Liddle girls’ room.” She stood carefully, so as not to stagger, and walked in more or less a straight line out of the room, out of the building, and into her car.

As Elaine was slipping shakily into the white Infiniti, Parker and Dalesia and McWhitney were getting into Dalesia’s Audi and driving, at first with parking lights only, slowly out of the factory building and away along the road in the opposite direction from where they would meet the armored cars later tonight. Their goal was a diner down near the MassPike, where they could have their dinner in guaranteed anonymity. They reached the diner, and as they drove into its parking area, the four armored cars from Boston rolled by unseen up on the Pike, slowing for their exit just ahead.

A few minutes later, when the armored cars turned in at the entrance to the Green Man Motel, their headlights cut short the goodbye kiss of Dr. Madchen and his Isabelle, who whispered hurried endearments, got into their separate cars, away from the headlights of all those trucks, and drove away to their for-the-moment homes.

The twelve crew members from the armored cars were booked into six rooms. It was nine-thirty now, and their escort would pick them up at one in the morning to lead them to the bank. In the meantime, they could shower, watch television, play cards, visit together, even nap. And when they did leave here at one o’clock, their traveling kits would stay in the rooms because they’d be coming back here once the move was finished, to get some real sleep before heading back east late tomorrow morning.

During the lead time before the robbery, Dalesia had been the man on the ground, learning the routes, finding places like the diner where they were eating now, and choosing the vehicles they would use tonight. Now, after they’d finished and paid, they got back into the Audi, and Dalesia led them first to the civilian car they would drive instead of one of their own. “It’s a wreck,” he told them, “but it runs. At least it’ll run as long as we need it.”

The used-car dealership he drove them to, just east of Rutherford, did not boast cutting-edge-security on its premises, but then, it didn’t have cutting edge in its goods for sale either. This was not an operation connected with a new-car dealer, selling pretty good trade-ins, but a small private guy whose stock consisted of clunkers waiting for their fourth or fifth owner, and meantime lined up in gloomy rows under flapping pennants.

Two floodlights atop the trailer used for an office were the main deterrent to thieves, but Dalesia ignored them, pulling onto the lot and stopping in front of the trailer door. Illuminated by the floodlights, he twisted around to hand a key on a cardboard tag to McWhitney in the backseat, saying, “The first time, I picked my way in, but then I found an extra key to the front door in the desk, so here it is and just leave it. Top drawer.”

“Good.”

Next, Dalesia gave McWhitney a small piece of notepaper from Trails End Motor Inne, saying, “When you get in, on your left, there’s a keypad. The number’s two-eight-five-seven. He’s got that in his Rolodex under ‘Alarm.’ The car key you want is on hook seventeen, for that Chevy Celebrity back there. And this is your route from here back to the factory.”

“See you there,” McWhitney said, and got out of the Audi.

They waited until he’d entered, stepped inside to disarm the alarm, and stepped back out to wave that everything was okay, and then Dalesia drove them away from there, southeast. Along the way, he said, “The situation with this police car, this is the wrong season for it. It’s in a very dinky little town, this time of year they don’t have a police force at all. I broke into their town hall to check them out, and they’ve got two retired cops come in the beginning of December and play police department until the middle of March. It’s because they’re right next to the base of a ski area, so all of a sudden the joint’s jumping. The rest of the year, the police car’s kept in a separate little garage out behind the town hall.”

“But it looks like a police car,” Parker said. As they drove, he was changing into the hat, shirt, and jacket of a police uniform.

“It is a police car, Tootsie Roll on top, the whole thing. You’ll see.”

It was a twenty-minute drive to the garaged police car, during which time, at Deer Hill Bank, the last of the invited guests finally trailed away, leaving Jack Langen and the hired security guy, Bart Hosfeld, and the other people in charge of tonight’s big move. “Time to start bringing everything upstairs,” Bart said, and the moving company people, who’d been waiting outside for nearly half an hour, came in to start the move. Every piece of paper from the downstairs vaults had been boxed and labeled, and now the boxes would be brought up to bank level and stacked near the front door, to make the transition as rapid as possible once the armored cars arrived.

At the hospital, the pill they’d given Jake had taken effect, but it had to fight a very troubled mind. Jake was groggily asleep, harried by bad dreams, never sinking all the way down into real rest. He argued with his dreams, fretfully, inconclusively, and some of the argument surfaced in muttering, low, distressed phrases that nearly made words.

The police car, which looked exactly like a police car, was twelve years old and had only forty-three thousand miles on it. It was a little stiff at first, but then smoothed down. Parker turned on the police radio to listen to the night as he drove toward the intersection where the job would go down.

In her room at the Green Man, Sandra Loscalzo also listened to the night, and it seemed to her that something unusual was going on out there. Every once in a while, there’d be a directive or a report that didn’t appear to contain a subject, and she was beginning to believe they were all on the same subject:

“I’ve finished running Route Eleven. Everything clear.”

“Be sure you’re in position to control the traffic light in Hurley when the time comes.”

Things like that kept snagging her attention—the glimmerings of some sort of movement in the night, like a whale too far below your ship to see. Something was starting up out there. Was it connected to her three guys?

There was one more vehicle for Dalesia to pick up tonight, the truck they’d transfer the goods to. This truck couldn’t be stolen, because they’d have to use it more than once after the robbery, so Dalesia and McWhitney two days ago had taken the MassPike west to Albany, New York, and rented a truck, McWhitney using his legitimate business credit card from his bar. It had been stashed since then in the municipal parking lot in Rutherford. Now, after delivering Parker to the police car, Dalesia drove to Rutherford, left the Audi in the truck’s place, and drove the truck to the factory.

McWhitney was already there with the Chevy Celebrity, a car about as old as Parker’s police car but which had gone through a much more strenuous life. It was dinged and scratched and dented all over, and the muffler sounded like a bad case of asthma, but it ran.

McWhitney had all four of the Celebrity’s doors open, so its interior lights illuminated to some extent the area around the car. Too much light might attract attention, which they didn’t want.

When Dalesia got out of the truck and joined him, McWhitney was studying the Carl-Gustafs and their rockets in this soft light. Looking up, he said, “I never loaded one of these things before.”

“If they were that easy to do wrong,” Dalesia said, “they wouldn’t sell them to so many third-world countries.”

“That sounds good. I’ll watch.”

“Sure,” Dalesia said, and armed the weapons with self-confident speed.

Watching him, McWhitney said, “Parker in place?”

“Just waiting,” Dalesia said.

“Like all of us.”

And like the armored car crews, all of whom were ready by one, when a police escort came to lead them to the Deer Hill Bank.

The five engines made enough noise pulling out of the parking area that Sandra went to the window and looked out. A whole lot of armored cars? Going where? Too late to get out to her own car and follow them. She went back to her scanners.

At one-thirty, when the moving men were just starting to load the four armored cars, under the direction of Jack Langen and other bank officials, separating files from commercial paper from cash, Dalesia used McWhitney’s pickup truck to leave the factory and go meet Elaine Langen and get the number of the armored car that they would want. And an hour later, Dalesia drove fast into the parking lot of the diner at the intersection where the robbery was to take place, and where Parker was waiting in the police car, because anybody who saw a police car behind a diner late at night would just assume the cops were cooping.

Parker saw the pickup drive in, and was out of the police car before Dalesia had stopped. Dalesia called out his open window, “Didn’t show! The damn party at the bank’s over, Parker.”

Parker got into the pickup. “I’ll direct you to her house,” he said, and removed the police hat and jacket along the way.

When they reached the Langen house, it was completely dark. There was a door at the end of the multi-car garage, with a window in it. They smashed the window, unlocked the door, stepped in, and the white Infiniti was there. They moved fast through the dark house, up to the second floor, found her room, switched on the light, and she lay on her back on the bed, asleep, dressed except for shoes.

“Wha?” she said, blinking, lifting her arms to protect her eyes. “Wha?”

“Up,” Parker told her. “Fast!”

“Oh, my God!” She sat up, horrified. “I forgot!”

“You got drunk. On your feet. Now!”

“I will, I will, oh, I can’t believe I—”

Wailing, she hurried away into the bathroom, and seven minutes later she was moving fast down the stairs with them, saying, “The maid sleeps way in the back, she won’t hear a thing.”

“You just go there and out,” Parker said.

“I can’t go back there for just one minute.”

They all went through the house to the garage, Parker saying, “Make it three minutes.”

“Five tops,” Dalesia said.

“Oh, God. I never thought I’d do a— It was the stress, it was my father’s— Oh, never mind.” Distracted, she triggered open the garage door. “I don’t know why I’m explaining myself.”

“We’ll follow you.”

Driving back toward the bank, seeing those headlights well back but constantly there in her rearview mirror, Elaine cursed herself for a fool. Everything she did was wrong. Shooting Jake, for God’s sake! Getting drunk and forgetting what she was supposed to do tonight, and for those people.

With a wince every time her eyes saw those headlights, small, sharp, accusing, she thought, what if they didn’t come after me until it was too late? It isn’t too late now, I can make up for it, but what would they have done if I’d spoiled the whole thing? They would not have let me live, she assured herself. They would not have let me live.

I want to get away from here. But not that way.

But she had another chance; she could still do it right. She’d go to the bank; she’d tell Jack she’d gone home for a nap but really wanted to see at least part of the big move, so here she was, back. She’d make chitchat for a few minutes, find out which armored car would contain the cash, and then plead tiredness, say she’d seen enough to get the general idea, and leave. Pausing next to that pickup truck.

She had just made out the lights and activity spilling out of the bank, far ahead, when the headlights behind her clicked off. She drove on, more and more slowly, and saw that the scene in front of the bank was of constant ordered activity, brightly illuminated. In order not to disturb the neighbors more than necessary, the lights had been set to shine toward the area in front of the bank but nowhere else, so it was a white cone of busy movement up there, surrounded by the blackness of this moonless overcast night, as though it were a scene on stage.

The parking spaces near the bank were all taken, by the armored cars and state and local police cars and vehicles belonging to the bank executives and the moving people and the private security firm. Elaine drove slowly by, seeing the blue-coveralled moving men coming out, pushing dollies on which the cardboard boxes rode. Bank employees with clipboards directed each dolly to the appropriate armored car. The back doors of the armored cars stood wide open, and all four cars, it seemed to Elaine, were already at least half full. So she hadn’t had much extra time to make up for her stupidity.

Slowly she rolled on by, and saw a dolly with a gray canvas bag on top of two boxes as a mover brought it to a stop behind the second armored car. More canvas bags were visible inside there.

Canvas bags were used for coins. This was the money car.

Elaine drove on by. On the driver’s door, as she passed it, were black, squared-off digits: 10268.

“One-oh-two-six-eight,” she whispered, and drove on, speeding up slightly. At the corner she turned right, and then at the next corner and the next, and then left, mouthing the five numbers over and over the whole time. A minute later, she angled into the left lane on the empty street to stop next to the pickup truck. “One-oh-two-six-eight.”

In the hospital, the pill Jake had been given had begun to weaken, but his turbulent brain had not. Closer and closer he came to real consciousness, though he didn’t want it. He wanted to be unconscious forever, but his brain wouldn’t let it happen.

Sandra Loscalzo listened to her scanners and studied her maps of Massachusetts. Unfortunately she didn’t have a detailed atlas of the state, and the road maps she did have wouldn’t show every minor road, but from what she was hearing out of the night, the thing, whatever it was, that was happening or going to happen, existed along a line that ran north and south, roughly from a town called Rutherford in the north to a town called Deer Hill in the south.

Neither of these towns meant anything to her. She had come to this part of the world in search of Michael Maurice Harbin, and this was clearly something else entirely. But something interesting.

Carrying one police scanner in its vinyl bag, plus her own leather shoulder bag with the .357 automatic in it and the best of her roadmaps, she left her room at three in the morning and went out to see what there might be to see. Rutherford seemed the largest town in the area. She’d start there.

Dalesia dropped Parker off at the police car, then drove back to the factory, where McWhitney had the weaponry already placed in the Celebrity, some in front and some in back. Dalesia drove the Celebrity; McWhitney sat in back, one palm resting on a Carl-Gustaf.

Sandra saw the police car behind the diner as she drove by, but thought it was empty. The next police car she saw contained two uniforms and was parked at an intersection with a traffic light in a very small town called Hurley.

I got to get out of here, Jake told himself, and when he realized he must be awake, he found he was sitting up, moaning slightly and moving his torso slowly left and right. It wasn’t bright in here, but he squinted as though it were. His whole head ached horribly, as though a clamp were being tightened around his skull. And he knew he had to get out of here; he had to get away; that was the only thing he knew.

He had not been on his feet since the shooting, but now he pushed himself off the bed and stood, tottering, bent forward, trying to find his body’s balance through the screaming ache in his head.

He shouldn’t have been able to walk. But the medicines he’d been given worked to combine now with the intense level of anxiety in his brain to short-circuit the pain signals his wounded leg tried desperately to send him, those lightning strokes of pain blurring and muddying before they could capture his attention.

He had too little strength in that leg now to accomplish a lot, but at least he could force himself to move. And did.

A door, in the right corner of the room. Would that be a closet? Would his clothes be in there? He wore only a two-piece blue-and-gray vertically striped pair of pajamas. He was barefoot.

Thinking hard about his balance, he moved away from the bed and toward that closed door. The knob was very hard to turn, the door much heavier than he’d expected, but yes, it was a closet. That was his zippered windbreaker hanging in there, and those were his shoes on the floor. No pants, which must have been messed up in the shooting.

He didn’t care. Holding on with both hands to the bar in the closet, concentrating, he stepped first his left foot and then his right foot into the shoes. Then he took the windbreaker off its hanger.

No. That was impossible. He had to clomp back over to the bed, the shoes feeling like alien weights on his feet, and sit on the bed again before he could put the windbreaker on and zip it up. Then, standing again, he crossed the room to the partly open hall door, looked outside at an empty hall, and went out.

It was really very late at night. There were no people moving around in the halls. Two nurses sat at their station near the elevators. He moved in their direction, trying to think how he could get past them and down the elevator without being seen, and on his left he passed a door marked STAIRWAY B. He went just beyond it, then stopped.

He couldn’t take an elevator. They’d see him here, and they’d see him on the ground floor. Could he go down the stairs? He was very weak and shaky; his balance was still unreliable. But how else was he going to get out of here?

The door to stairway B was one of the heaviest things Jake had ever in his life tried to move. It opened inward toward the stairs, so he could lean his weight on it and at last get it open enough so that he could slide through.

And here was a metal stairwell, and metal stairs going down. Jake looked at them, and a wave of dizziness made him drop back, leaning against the closed door behind him.

Only one thing to do. He sat on the floor and inched himself forward until his feet were over onto the first step down. Then he used hands and feet to move his torso down onto that step. And then the next step, and the next.

It turned out, he’d been on the third floor. It took a long time to get down all those steps, but after a while he found a rhythm in it, and he could just blank his mind and keep moving.

To the bottom, where he made it to his feet again and found another impossibly heavy door. Once again he forced his way through, and came out to one side of the main waiting room. Two of its walls, to his left and ahead, were glass in the upper half, on his left showing the admissions desk, straight ahead a side view of the front entrance. There were people in their own glass-sided room beyond the admissions desk, but none looked over here.

Jake kept to the wall and moved slowly around the room till he reached the next heavy door, this one mostly glass. He pushed through it and moved to the entrance, which was a revolving door, and even that was heavier than it should have been.

But he made it, around and out, and slowly but steadily walked away into the cool night air. No stars, no cars, no people. Just Jake, getting away. Everything would be all right now.

As the armored car crews climbed into their vehicles, shutting the rear doors, Jack Langen stood beaming in self-satisfaction on the sidewalk. What a night, what a beautiful night. As he stood there, Bart Hosfeld from the security company came over with his own broad smile and said, “So far, it goes down like cream.”

Nodding at the last of the armored cars, Jack said, “That’s the only one I’m really worried about. All that commercial paper, bonds. What a nightmare to lose that.”

Bart said, “Really? Not the cash?”

“Well, the cash, too,” Jack agreed, “but not as much. From the minute we knew this move would take place, we’ve been cutting back the cash at this location, not adding to it. It’s still a lot, but not as much as it was.”

“Well, it’s all going fine,” Bart said. Looking around, he said, “I wanted to say good night to your good wife.”

“Elaine? She left hours ago. Before dinner ended.”

“Really? I could have sworn I saw her car, not an hour back.”

“She’s long since asleep,” Jack said, and smiled. He preferred to think of Elaine asleep.

As the line of armored cars moved away from the bank, preceded by one private security car and followed by another, Dalesia and McWhitney arrived in the Celebrity at the intersection. They saw the police car but went on by, started out the road to the right, stopped, and reversed around in a half turn on the shoulder of the road. The right side of the car now faced the intersection.

Sandra had noticed several police cars stopped along the route she’d taken north, but she’d reached Rutherford without seeing anything actually happen. She’d decided to retrace her steps south when she heard, from the scanner on the seat beside her, “They’re on their way.”

Oh, really? Sandra made a U-turn and headed fast toward Deer Hill.

Jack Langen and Bart Hosfeld and a few of the others who would have work to do tonight at the Rutherford end of the operation left in a short caravan of vehicles, taking a different route from the armored cars, faster in some ways and more direct, but through built-up areas that were too chancy for the transport of the bank’s assets. Driving along, listening to a Frank Sinatra CD, at moments even singing along, Jack thought to himself that today, tonight, he had at last completed the first step in separating himself from what he now liked to think of as the first Mrs. Jack Langen.

The first one bought me, he thought. The second one I’ll buy. “It was a very good year.”

As she waited for the red light to change at Hurley, Sandra saw one of the uniforms get out of the police car stopped there and go over to the pole containing the control panel for the traffic light. It switched to green before he got there, but he unlocked and opened the door anyway, as Sandra drove on.

It was happening now. Whatever it was, it was happening. She remembered the various police cars she’d seen along the way, and then she remembered the first one she’d seen, silent and dark behind a diner, and this time it struck her as strange. That would be just ahead now, wouldn’t it? All the other police cars tonight were out and obviously waiting for something. That one had been . . . hiding?

Ahead of her was the very intersection, and vehicles were just coming into it from the other direction. Sandra slowed when she saw what they were. First a white car with yellow and red words and symbols on its doors and hood and a warning light unlit on its roof. Then a large, square red box of an armored car, with a black hood. And another one behind it. And another.

This is it. She knew it; this was what was happening tonight. And was this what those three friends of Mike Harbin were involved with?

Sandra slowed almost to a stop. The first car passed through the intersection and continued, coming this way. The first armored car followed it across the intersection. Two more were behind it, in the intersection, and now a fourth was visible, behind the third.

Sandra was trying to see if there was a fifth armored car, and wondering what all these armored cars would be used for, when all at once flashes and explosions erupted from the darkness on the left, and then more explosions happened at the armored cars themselves. The whole engine compartment of the first one exploded into the air, raining chunks of black metal, and at the same time the same thing happened to the fourth in line, throwing the whole intersection into a sudden garish glare.

Sandra slammed on the brakes. She stared, amazed, as the lead car slued around, trying to get back, and men tumbled out of the lead armored car and, simultaneously, another flash and explosion on the left met an explosion onto the third armored car as lights suddenly flashed behind the diner, white lights and red lights, and, siren screaming, the police car came tearing out from behind the diner to slide to a stop next to the only armored car that hadn’t been hit.

An amplified voice from a loudspeaker in the police car ordered, “FOLLOW ME. DON’T STOP; FOLLOW ME.” And the police car veered away, the driver’s uniformed left arm out his window, urgently gesturing at the armored car to follow. Which it did, lurching rightward, then hurrying off after the cop and away from its maimed companions, while Sandra thought, that’s not right. There’s something wrong about that.

The lead escort car had given up trying to get around and past the burning wreckage of the first armored car, and now brown-uniformed men came crowding out of it, guns in their hands. The armored car crews, having escaped from their destroyed vehicles, wandered in a daze or sat on the asphalt in the middle of the intersection, holding their heads. Sandra watched it all, glaring and distorted by the light of the three flaming trucks, and suddenly thought, it’s a fake. “It’s a phony,” she said out loud. “The police car’s a phony!”

She had to tell them; she had to let them know. The story isn’t here, with these blocked roads and burning trucks and dazed people. The story just went away with the only armored car that wasn’t hit. Get after that phony cop. She actually had her hand on the door handle, shifting her weight to get out of the car, when she thought again. Wait a second. Whose side am I on here? If those are my three guys—and who else could they be?—I don’t want them arrested, I don’t want them in jail. That way I’d never get the proof I need on Mike Harbin.

Keep going, fellas, she thought, as she put the car in reverse and U-turned backward away from there. Keep going, and I’ll see you in a couple days.

Quickly the fires shrank and then disappeared from her mirror.

2

Parker spun the wheel hard right, pounded the brake, and the police car skewed around to a juddering stop, crossways on the road. He jumped out to the asphalt, looked over the car’s roof at the oncoming armored car, and put both arms up over his head, waving them back and forth to tell the driver to stop. He could see the driver plain in his dashboard lights, hunched so far forward over the wheel, his nose nearly touched the flat glass pane of the divided windshield. Beside him, the guard was shouting into a microphone with a spiral black cord.

The driver hit his brakes, pushing himself back from the window with one hand, then waved his own arms, asking Parker in dumb show what he was supposed to do next. Parker pointed at him and then at the roadside, telling him to get out of there, but the guy firmly shook his head. He knew he was supposed to stay with his vehicle.

But then he twisted around, staring backward, and so did the other guard, so the one in back must have seen Dalesia and McWhitney coming. Yes, now Parker did, too: the two running forward from where they’d left the Celebrity behind the armored car, Dalesia on the driver’s side, McWhitney on the other. Both now wore white hooded sweatshirts with the hood up over their heads and forward beside their faces, and both had on deeply black sunglasses with very large lenses. Both ran with the Colt Commandos held in front of their chests at port arms.

The driver put his engine in gear, and the armored car lurched forward as he labored the wheel around, hoping to drive around the police car in his way, but Dalesia stopped beside his door and fired twice from the hip directly into the doorlock. On the other side, McWhitney showed his weapon to the guard but didn’t fire it.

The armored car stopped. Dalesia tugged on the door he’d hit, and it eased open, and Dalesia went nuts, screaming, “Out of there!” Like a maniac, like someone barely under any kind of control, he screamed again before the men in the truck could react to the first order, “You wanna die? You wanna die? I’ll blow your fucking heads off!” Then he made a high keening sound, like a banshee, and aimed the Commando at the driver’s face.

“I’m coming! I’m coming! Here I come, take it easy, honest to God—”

As the driver and then the guard climbed out, both on the driver’s side, McWhitney ran back to deal with the third guard.

“Over there! Over there!”

Dalesia, jumping around as though he couldn’t control his legs, pointed at the dirt road that angled off from here, and the two guards moved toward it. Parker came around the back of the police car, carrying the handcuffs, as Dalesia made the two lie facedown on the road and McWhitney brought up the third, who’d come out of his compartment without trouble.

The three were handcuffed, and then Parker ran back to the police car, Dalesia to the armored car, and McWhitney to the Celebrity. In that order they drove away from there, only Parker showing headlights, the other two staying close, guided by his lights.

It was fifteen minutes to the factory, where the rented truck waited for them. Parker and McWhitney wiped down the cars they’d been driving, while Dalesia backed the armored car around to the open back of the truck. Then they looked to see what they had.

The interior of the armored car was less than two-thirds full, and a quarter of that was canvas bags, which would be coins. They didn’t want the coins. Dalesia, climbing up into the armored car as McWhitney shone a flashlight into it, lifted the lid off one of the boxes, and they all saw the neat stacks of green.

Dalesia laughed. “My favorite color,” he said, and put the lid back down on the box, and they started the transfer.

Dalesia, staying in the armored car, moved each box to the rear door, Parker lifted it over the space to the truck, and in the truck McWhitney stacked them all.

The whole operation took less than ten minutes. Then Dalesia got behind the wheel of the truck and said, “I’ll see you there.” He drove out, and that left only the illumination from the interior light of the rental Dodge, with the driver’s door open.

“We’ll give him a couple minutes,” Parker said.

They leaned against the side of the pickup, and McWhitney said, “I like that Carl-Gustaf. You point it at something, the thing stops.”

“Briggs earned his cut,” Parker said. “We can go now.”

But as they turned away, they heard a distant flapping sound, high and repetitive. They looked at each other, and Parker said, “Helicopter.”

“That was fast.”

“Everybody’s on alert,” Parker said. “Maybe we shouldn’t be two cars traveling together.”

McWhitney nodded. “You want me to go first?”

“You remember the way?”

“I’ll find it.”

McWhitney climbed into the pickup and drove out of the building. As he left, the flapping sound got louder, though never directly overhead, and then it got softer again, and then it faded out. When it was gone, Parker got into the Dodge and drove out to the black night, switching on his headlights once he was on the road.

He hadn’t gone far when the flapping sound came back, and this time he saw them: two long, narrow floodlight beams angled down from beneath two helicopters, one behind him near the scene of the robbery, the other up to his left, in case they’d continued northward.

The one from behind was coming this way. Parker drove steadily, and the finger of light illuminated trees and houses in his rearview mirror, closer and closer. He kept going, and the light approached him, then angled away to his right, hovering beside him a minute, so the people up there could study his car without blinding him. Then it swung on out to the front and moved ahead.

A few minutes later, as the two floodlights still walked like laser stilts across the night, Parker passed Dalesia in the truck, stopped and lightless beside a closed gas station. He was waiting for the helicopters to leave, knowing they’d be too interested in any truck-sized vehicle moving around in this area right now.

The light to the left disappeared first, and then the one straight ahead veered rightward and also disappeared. When Parker reached the church and drove around behind it, McWhitney paced back and forth just outside the lean-to, looking irritated. Parker opened his window and said, “What did you do with your pickup?”

Pointing farther back behind the church, McWhitney said, “There’s some trees back there.”

Parker steered that way, saw the pickup nosed in among some scrubby trees, and put the Dodge in the same area, though he doubted those trees would hide much in the daytime. Then he walked back to McWhitney, who said, “You see Nick?”

“Yeah, he was getting out of the way. He’ll be along.”

“I don’t like how fast they’re being,” McWhitney said.

3

Dalesia drove the truck in around the side of the church ten minutes later. With hand gestures, Parker and McWhitney guided him to maneuver the truck in deeply under the lean-to until its right side was an inch from the rear wall of the church. Then Dalesia climbed down from the cab and said, “We made a stir.”

“Don’t need it,” McWhitney said.

“No, we don’t,” Dalesia agreed. “But we got it. Let’s get the tarp over this thing.”

Earlier, they had stashed in here, hidden beneath crèche figures, a gray canvas tarp that would not reflect the light. Now, with Parker holding a flashlight to guide them, Dalesia and McWhitney draped it over the top and hood and left side of the truck. Then Parker switched off the light, and McWhitney said, “Now we go in the church, right? Wait it out.”

Dalesia said, “Where’d you put your cars?”

“Back in the trees,” McWhitney told him.

“There’s too many choppers out,” Dalesia said. “Why not put them across the road, beside the house there?”

“It’s empty,” McWhitney objected. “The locals are gonna know they don’t belong.”

Parker said, “Nick’s right. From the helicopter, our cars look as though we’re trying to hide. Next to a house, they’re normal. Tomorrow, we’ll get them out of here.”

“Not in the morning, though,” Dalesia said. “This heat isn’t gonna go away for a while.”

McWhitney said, “I tell you what. I’ll put my pickup in front of the church, and Parker puts his car next to the house across the street. That way, during the day tomorrow, I’m a guy doing maintenance and he’s the real estate broker.”

Dalesia laughed. “I like your story lines,” he said. “Parker?”

“Sure.”

They stepped out from under the lean-to, but then, from far off to their right, they heard the flap-flap again, and moved back inside. The helicopter never came close, but the noise of it ricocheted from the ground for about three minutes, while that thin vertical light moved over there like a pendulum made of a fluorescent tube.

At last the helicopter moved on, out of sight and out of sound, and then they moved the cars, Parker leaving the Dodge in front of the separate garage at the end of the driveway on the left side of the house.

He was about to turn back when he saw headlights approaching from the right, the same direction they’d come from. He dropped to the ground beside the Dodge and watched a car with a bubble light on top, unlit, hurry by; SHERIFF could be faintly read on the door.

After the sheriff’s department car left, Parker stood and went back across the road, where Dalesia had the church front door open and called to him, “Come in over here.”

It was very dark inside the church. There were too many large windows down both sides to permit them to use a light. Parker shut the door behind himself and spoke into the dark: “That was a sheriff’s car.”

“Well, they’re out and about,” Dalesia said. “You got that flashlight?”

“For what?”

“There’s got to be a basement in here,” Dalesia told him. “For Boy Scout meetings, ladies’ auxiliary, AA.”

McWhitney said, “Maybe the coffeemaker’s still there.”

Parker held his fingers over the flashlight lens, switched it on, separated the first two fingers slightly, and by that faint light they moved around the church, which had wide straight lines of dark wood pews and a central aisle, a railing across the front, and beyond it a bare plaster wall. Whatever altar and decorations had once been there were gone.

A door to the left of the entrance opened on stairs up to a pocket choir loft and down to a U-turn a half flight below. “That’s what we want,” Dalesia said.

It was. They went down, past the U-turn in the stairs, and below the church was a long, low-ceilinged rectangular room with cream walls and a pale, worn linoleum floor. Shelves and counters filled the wall along the back, amid spaces where stove, refrigerator, and dishwasher had been. The double sink was still there, but when they twisted the faucets, nothing happened.

The most interesting part was the windows, narrow horizontal ones down both sides of the room, high up near the ceiling, that cranked out and up. To each window had been added two narrow wooden strips, attached to the wall above and below the window, with a sliding cream-painted sheet of thin plywood between that could be moved either to block the window or to clear it. The system looked crude and homemade, but effective.

Looking at the windows, Dalesia said, “They showed movies down here. Close them, we’re gonna be fine.”

They slid all the plywood panels shut, and McWhitney said, “Shine your flash on a couple windows on that side, I’ll go up and see does anything show through.”

He was gone, up into the darkness, for about three minutes, while Parker shone the light at two of the plywood panels, and when he came back down, he said, “Dark as hell up there. Nothing showed.”

“Good,” Dalesia said.

“Also,” McWhitney said, “another chopper went by.”

“Not good.”

“You know it. I just got back inside before the light went right over this place.”

Dalesia said, “It did? We didn’t see a thing.”

“So that’s good, then,” McWhitney said, and looked around, saying, “Do you suppose the power still comes in here?”

“The panel’s back there, where the refrigerator used to be,” Dalesia said, and they went back to take a look. When they opened the circuit breaker box, the main switch at the bottom had been moved to Off, and all the circuit switches were also set at Off. A paper chart pasted to the inside of the metal door showed which breaker ran which circuit.

Dalesia studied the list. After a minute he said, “Rec. That would be rec room, right? Suppose there’s any law going by out there?”

McWhitney said, “I’ll go up. When I get there, you throw the switch. If I holler, switch it off again.”

“Good.”

Parker said, “Let’s make sure something’s on,” and he walked back to the stairs with McWhitney, where a set of four light switches was mounted on the wall. He flipped one of them up and said, “We’ll see what happens.”

“Give me a minute,” McWhitney said, and went away upstairs. Parker stayed by the light switches, and Dalesia, with Parker’s flashlight, stayed by the circuit breaker box.

McWhitney called down, “Try it now.”

Parker said to Dalesia, “He says, now.”

Dalesia moved first the main switch and then the circuit breaker switch marked “rec,” and fluorescents in the dropped ceiling, down at his end, began to sputter into life. Parker called up to McWhitney, “It’s on. Anything up there?”

“Nothing.” McWhitney came back down and said, “I had to close the door at the top of the stairs, some light comes up there. But now we’ll be fine.” Looking out at the rec room, he said, “Snug. We’re gonna be snug.”

Parker flipped on one more switch, so now they had pockets of light at both ends of the room. Dalesia came over to give Parker back his flashlight and to say, “No coffeemaker, though. In fact, no water.”

“We got bottled water and candy and stuff stashed out back,” McWhitney said. “And now we got light and a roof down here. Come on, we’ll get the stuff and bring it down, and then we’ll just wait it out till morning, see what we got then.”

They started for the stairs, Parker flicking on the flashlight, and Dalesia paused to say, “You know what we got here? It’s not just light and a roof. We’re in a church, Nels. What we got, we got sanctuary.”

4

Parker woke first. The original idea had been, they would come here and divvy the boxes from the truck right away, Dalesia taking Jake’s piece with him, Parker taking Briggs’s. They might sleep a while in the vehicles, but then they would leave early in the morning. McWhitney would drive the rental truck, because his name was on the paperwork, while Dalesia would take McWhitney’s pickup with his and McWhitney’s shares in it. Parker, finished, would head home, while McWhitney dropped off the truck at a nearby office of the rental company and then drove Dalesia to the municipal parking lot in Rutherford where the Audi had been left.

Except it wasn’t going to work like that. Law enforcement in recent years had come to expect an attack from somewhere outside the United States, that could hit anywhere at any time and strike any kind of target, and they’d geared up for it. Because of that, the few hours Parker and the other two had been counting on weren’t there.

They couldn’t leave this place, not yet, not with the money from the bank on them, but they couldn’t stay here either. Having electricity all by itself wasn’t enough. They needed food, they needed water, and they needed a better place to sleep than a wooden pew in the church, which was at least a little less hard and cold than the linoleum floor downstairs.

When Parker opened his eyes, lying on his back on the pew, pale early morning light gleamed in through the windows on the left side of the church, and darkness seemed to be drawn out through the windows on the right. His body stiff, he sat up and saw that Dalesia and McWhitney still slept on nearby pews. He got to his feet, stretched, bent, and then went to the front door. He opened it, made sure no traffic was going by, then went out, moved around to the rear of the church, relieved himself, and washed face and hands with bottled water. Far away, he heard the flap-flap, but then it faded.

Back inside the church, he went up to take a look at the choir loft, and saw that it had a round window at the back, above the front door. As he looked out through it, a state police car drove by. He watched it, then stepped back and looked at the space.

It was very cluttered. As wide as the church below, it was a narrow area with a railed opening at the front, above the main church. At one time, it had been lined with rows of wooden folding chairs. These, along with a lot of cardboard boxes of the same sort as the ones they’d taken from the bank, were now stacked up almost everywhere. Parker opened one of the boxes, and it was full of hymnals, heavy books with thick shiny paper and speckled dark red covers.

Was there anything to do with these boxes? They weren’t exactly like the ones from the bank, though very similar. It was a style of box with a separate cardboard top and fairly long sides that was sold to be used as storage. A dull white, they had handholds cut into the two narrow ends. When television showed U.S. marshals carrying evidence into federal courtrooms, they used these boxes.

How could Parker and the others make use of these things? Put a top layer of hymnals over the cash underneath? But at a roadblock, any cop was likely to lift at least one book.

Parker heard movement downstairs, looked over the front railing, and saw the other two starting to rouse. Dalesia looked up, saw him, and said, “Anything interesting up there?”

“I don’t think so.”

Parker went downstairs, and McWhitney said, “After I go out and take a leak, I’ll drive somewhere and find us something to eat. Then we gotta figure out what we’re gonna do around here.”

“How we’re gonna get away from here,” Dalesia said.

McWhitney shook his head. “With the profits? I don’t think so. I’ll be back.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Dalesia said.

They left the building, and Parker went back downstairs, switching on the lights. There were closets and cabinets down here, and a storeroom and a room with the furnace and water heater. Parker searched everywhere and found nothing of use. Anything that could be removed without structural damage had been taken out of here.

He went back upstairs, and Dalesia was in the choir loft. He called down, “You see these boxes?”

“Yeah.”

“Like ours.”

“Doesn’t help.”

“Yeah, I know. Only it’s like a coincidence.”

Except it wasn’t; those were the boxes you got when you needed boxes and when, like a bank or a church, you didn’t get your boxes from your neighborhood liquor store.

Dalesia came downstairs. Inside the chipper manner, he looked worried. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” he said.

“I know.”

“We were supposed to get out right away.”

“We couldn’t.”

“But the longer we stick around, the worse it gets. What if it’s a week before they call off the search?” With a gesture at the open, empty church, he said, “We can’t stay here that long.”

“I know it.”

“We don’t have a base, Parker,” Dalesia said. “We need a base.”

“We need to get out of here,” Parker said.

McWhitney brought coffee and pastries and news: “I heard it on the radio in the pickup; they got Jake.”

The three were sitting on pews at the front of the church to eat their breakfasts. Dalesia said, “What do you mean, they got Jake? He’s in the hospital.”

“He went outa there last night,” McWhitney said. “Don’t ask me why. The cops found him this morning, wandering around in his hospital pj’s. They said he was disoriented.”

“Sounds it,” Dalesia said.

“But then,” McWhitney said, “they said he was cooperating.”

“Oh?” Dalesia frowned. “Disoriented and cooperating?”

“His sister’s with the cops,” McWhitney said. “She’s the one they quoted on the radio. Her brother’s cooperating.”

Parker said, “She’s cooperating.”

“Sure,” Dalesia said. “Trying to help her brother, soften the blow.”

“Well, what do they know, those two?” McWhitney asked. “They don’t know me at all. They could describe you guys.”

Dalesia said, “Jake could make a little trouble for me. Not for Parker. But I’ll have to move around some.”

Parker said, “They’ll sink the wife.”

“Christ, they will,” Dalesia said. “And the doctor, you think?”

Parker shook his head. “The doctor didn’t do anything. He thought he was gonna do something, but then he didn’t have to. If he just keeps his mouth shut now, he’s fine.”

McWhitney finished his coffee and threw the plastic cup at the wall where the altar used to be. “He’s fine,” he said. “What about us? Parker, every move we make outside this building is full of risk. The cops are everywhere. It said on the radio, they’re bringing in cops from out of state. It said, if they don’t find us in three days, maybe they’ll bring in the National Guard. The weapons we used, and the fact it’s a bank, the feds are part of it.”

Dalesia said, “We’ve got to get out of this part of the country. We’ve just got to.”

“You haven’t been out there,” McWhitney told him. “I was just a few minutes each way, stayed on little nothing roads, I was stopped twice, show ID, search the car, thank you very much. One of the cops, I said I’m headed back to Long Island, he gave me a friendly advice, stay away from the MassPike, it’s a horror scene down there, roadblocks every exit, traffic backed up to Boston.” He laughed, without much humor. “There’s a lot of drivers out there this morning, Nick,” he said, “don’t like us guys at all.”

“But there’s still no choice,” Dalesia said. “We’ve still got to move on away from here.”

Parker said, “The problem is the cash. We can’t carry it, and we can’t stay here, so the only thing to do, we leave it. We can scoop out a handful each, but that’s it.”

McWhitney looked deeply pained. “Leave it? After what we went through to get it?”

Parker said, “You put even one of those boxes of cash in your pickup, on the seat beside you, or I put it in the trunk of my car, the first roadblock we come to we’re done.”

“I know that, Parker,” McWhitney said. “I was just out there. But there’s got to be some way we can move that cash around the cops or through them or something.”

“Nothing,” Parker said. “There’s nothing.”

McWhitney hated this. “So whadda we do, then? We just leave it all here? I can’t walk away from that truck out there, Parker, I rented that in my own name. So what are we supposed to do, just dump it all out on the ground?”

“No,” Parker said. “We stash it.”

Dalesia said, “That’s a lotta boxes out there, Parker. Where we gonna find to stash that much stuff?”

“The choir loft,” Parker said.

5

There was a windowless door on the right side of the church, down near where the altar had once stood. Outside the door was a small gray concrete slab, and two concrete steps going down to ground level. Wrought-iron railings on both sides had been broken off and taken away, leaving twisted iron stubs.

The door was locked, and would open inward. McWhitney went around to the outside, stood on the slab, and kicked it open. Then they started moving the boxes out of the truck, at first only as far as the side wall of the lean-to.

When the first part was done, McWhitney drove his pickup around to that side and left it next to the wall, just forward of the doorway, its front end toward the road. That would both explain the open door and hide their movements as they carried the boxes around and into the church.

After the last box had been lugged in and stacked on the front pews, McWhitney kicked the door shut again, because otherwise it kept sagging open. And now they started the third and final part of the move, which was the longest and the hardest.

First they shifted some of the chairs and hymnal boxes that were upstairs, crowding them all as far as possible over to the left. Then they started bringing up the money boxes, stacking them in the right corner, four high, with hymnal boxes stacked on top. When everything was upstairs, they rearranged the rest of the boxes and chairs again, so that at the end it had the same cluttered look as before, but more crowded.

The whole move had taken more than two hours. Downstairs again, sitting in the pews, drinking the last of the bottled water as they caught their breath, they were all quiet for a few minutes, until McWhitney said, “I figure a month.”

“At least,” Dalesia said.

“We can’t leave that stuff up there forever,” McWhitney said. “You never know, they could sell the building for an antique shop, clear out the choir loft and hello, what’s this?”

Parker said, “We’ll give it a month, then see how things look around here.”

McWhitney finished his water. “Time to go,” he said. “Nick, follow me while I turn the truck in, then I’ll drive you to your car.”

“I’ll shut down here,” Parker said.

Dalesia said, “Don’t anybody try to get in touch with me, I’m gonna be on the move. I’ll call you two one of these days.”

“I’ll be in my bar,” McWhitney said, “unless that Sandra decides to shoot me, so we can keep in touch through me.”

Dalesia said, “What’s she gonna shoot you for? You’re gonna make her rich with all that Harbin money.”

McWhitney grinned. “Maybe she’d like to co-own a bar.”

McWhitney and Dalesia left, McWhitney leading in the rental truck. After they were gone, Parker went through to remove things that might identify them later on, like coffee cups and water bottles. Everything went into the bag McWhitney had brought breakfast in.

He also went downstairs to be sure nothing had been left behind. He shut off the power, and used his flashlight to get back up to the main floor.

Finished with the church, Parker went to the front door, looked out, saw that the road was empty, and crossed over to the Dodge, which he’d left parked next to the empty house. He drove off, and the first town he came to, four miles away, he threw away the bag in a municipal trash barrel. Except for four thousand dollars in cash in his pockets, he was carrying nothing with him that he hadn’t brought here.

It was seven miles farther on that he saw his first roadblock, up ahead. It was positioned where a driver coming this way wouldn’t be able to see it until he was close enough to be seen, with no turnoffs.

This being a small road with little traffic, the cops weren’t dealing with anybody else at that moment, so all four of them, two each for the east and westbound lanes, waved him down. One looked at John B. Allen’s identification while another checked the trunk.

Parker said, when he got his ID back, “Where can I find a diner? I’m looking for lunch.”

“Sorry, pal,” the cop said. “We’re not from around here. Just keep on, you’ll find something.”

Parker kept on.

6

Staying north of the MassPike, but still meeting roadblocks now and again, and with more than the usual traffic on these secondary roads, Parker traveled as due west as he could, figuring to leave Massachusetts and drive well into New York State before turning south. He wanted to get out of the search area as fast as possible, but he did need to eat.

The diner he found was still in Massachusetts. They had placed a television set on the back counter, because an Albany station was doing a special on the robbery and the search for the “bandits,” as they called them. Parker gave his order, looked at the television screen, and the first thing he saw was Dr. Madchen.

It was some sort of press conference, a podium in front of a blank yellow wall. Standing at the podium was the doctor, with a hangdog expression on his face, and a balled-up white handkerchief in his right hand that from time to time he pressed to his eyes. Standing beside him was a thirtyish woman, slender, with severe good looks and black hair in a bun. She wore a black broad-collared suit and high-neck white blouse, and it was soon obvious she was the doctor’s lawyer.

A number of reporters were apparently out of sight behind the camera. When Parker first looked at the screen, the doctor was answering a question from one of them:

“I just feel so sorry for poor Jake right now. I know he tried to reform himself, I sincerely know he sincerely wanted to live a good life. If my own personal tragedy hadn’t just now occurred—I mean, it’s so hard for me to think after what’s just happened—if I could, I’d do what I could to help Jake. He’s a weak man, I admit that, but he isn’t a bad man. He was led into this, just led into it.”

One of the unseen reporters, male, asked, “Do you think there’s any chance the authorities will think you were involved, Doctor?”

Looking more surprised than worried, the doctor said, “Well, I certainly hope not. I mean, I can’t think why they would. I’m a doctor, not a— Why would those people even want me with them, those robbers?”

The lawyer leaned in at that point to say, “We are in discussion with the authorities, and there is no doubt that Mr. Beckham said some very strange things while he was in his delirium, when the police first talked to him. We take those statements, from a delirious and apparently guilt-racked mind, at face value, which is to say none, and we expect the police will make the same evaluation. It is of course a terrible accident of timing. This is a moment when Dr. Madchen should be permitted the solitude of his private grief. Instead of which, he cannot grieve for his departed wife, as anyone else would be able to, but has to defend himself against the ravings of a temporarily disordered mind.”

Another reporter’s voice asked, “Doctor, did your wife have a history of heart disease?”

“Not at all.” Dr. Madchen could be seen to be overcome for just a moment as he lowered his head, dabbed the handkerchief against his eyes, and clung hard to the podium with his other hand. Then he took a deep breath, nodded out at the reporters, and said, “I was not my wife’s primary physician, of course. I’ve been on the phone with her regular doctor, and he did tell me things I hadn’t known. That he had counseled Ellen about her eating habits, for instance, and the lack of exercise in her life. I’d been aware of all that, but I had never— Ellen was so healthy, and then all at once—” And he lowered his head again.

Parker’s burger and fries arrived. As he ate and watched the press conference, he remembered what the good doctor had said, that time in his car when Parker and Dalesia had told him to stay away from Jake. “If this thing you two are doing doesn’t happen, I’m going to die. I can’t live. You’re my last hope.”

“Yes, the police phoned me at seven thirty this morning,” the doctor was saying. “They wanted to tell me to stay at home, because they were coming to interview me. They told me about poor Jake, but not at that time about those . . . things he was saying. I said I’d wait at home for them, and I went to tell Ellen, and that’s when I . . . I found her.”

Parker ate his lunch. As soon as Dr. Madchen had been told, in that phone call, that Jake had been picked up, he’d known, no matter whether the robbery worked out or not, there would be nothing in it for him. As he’d said, in that case, somebody was going to die. He’d thought he would be that somebody, but when it came down to it, he’d found a substitute.

Parker ordered coffee, and when he looked back at the screen, a commercial was ending, to be replaced by a black-and-white drawing of a head shot, faced forward, the kind of thing done by police artists based on the memory of eyewitnesses. Like all such drawings, the guy looked too mean to be true, glaring out at the television audience. Over the picture, a woman’s voice was saying, “One police officer in our area does seem to have encountered at least one of the robbers shortly before the crime took place.”

The television picture cut now to two women seated at a table, with a bank of television screens on a wall behind them, showing an array of news and sports scenes. The woman on the left, about forty, was metallically pretty, with ironed-on blonde hair, a lemon- yellow sports jacket, and pale yellow blouse. The woman on the right was the cop who’d braced Parker.

The first one made the introductions: “I have with me now Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa of Massachusetts CID, who seems to have tied together some of the loose ends in this case. Welcome, Detective.”

“Thank you.” Detective Reversa smiled, happy to be there, but showed she wasn’t going to be overly impressed by her moment of fame.

“Detective Reversa, your encounter with the alleged robber began with your investigation of what seemed to be a very different case, did it not?”

“Yes, Sue. I was assigned to investigate the shooting of Jake Beckham. In a case like that, where there doesn’t seem to be any reason for what happened, you want to talk to as many of the victim’s acquaintances as possible, and one of those was Elaine Langen.”

“The most astonishing character in the whole event,” the other woman said, with a big happy smile. “You could have had no idea, when you first went to interview Elaine Langen, that she was in the middle of a scheme to rob her own husband’s bank.”

“No,” Reversa said, with her own little smile, “that one was not going to occur to me. Nor that she was the one, in fact, who’d shot Mr. Beckham, who it turned out was a former lover of hers.”

“Elaine Langen’s gun had gone missing.”

“Yes, Sue, that was the first hint that the situation might not be as clear-cut as it seemed. And a car outside the house when I arrived she said belonged to a landscape designer. When I later saw that same car—”

“Which turned out to be stolen.”

“Yes, from New Jersey, but I didn’t know that then, I don’t think it had been reported yet. But since, by that time, I had the feeling there was something wrong with Mrs. Langen, although I didn’t yet know what, when I saw that landscape designer’s car at another time, I decided to take a look at him.”

The other woman chortled over this. “Some landscape designer, eh?” Then, looking at the camera, she said, “This is Detective Reversa’s memory of that landscape designer,” and the mug shot drawing came on again.

They think that’s me, Parker thought, and studied it, as the interviewer’s voice, over the picture, said, “This is almost certainly one of the robbers.”

An 800 number appeared, superimposed over the drawing. “If you see this man, phone this number. Rutherford Combined Savings has posted a one-hundred-thousand-dollar reward for the capture and conviction of this man and any other member of the gang, and the recovery of the nearly two million, two hundred thousand dollars stolen in the robbery.”

Parker looked up and down the counter. Half a dozen other people were gazing at the television set. None of them looked to be ready to go off and make a phone call. It seemed to him, if you told one of those people, “This picture is that guy. See the cheekbones? See the shape of the forehead?” they’d say, “Oh, yeah!” But if it wasn’t pointed out, they’d just go on eating lunch.

The screen showed the two women again. The interviewer said, “Detective Reversa, what was the result of your meeting with this man?”

“I obtained an identification, in the form of a New York State driver’s license, in the name of John B. Allen.” She spelled it.

The interviewer nodded, and produced another smile. “Detective, would you like to meet up with John B. Allen again?”

Reversa laughed. “If I had the appropriate backup.”

“Check,” Parker said.

He paid and started for the door, then stopped. Outside, off to the right, a police car was stopped behind the Dodge. Parker studied the newspapers in the rack beside the entrance, and the police car moved away to the right and stopped again, at the end of the lot, facing the road.

John B. Allen. One computer talks to another, and it doesn’t take long. He’d been moving through the roadblocks just ahead of the news. John B. Allen is wanted for robbery over here. John B. Allen rented a car over there. Let’s find the car, and wait for Allen to come back to it.

That was the only identification he had on him. He had cash, but nothing else. He couldn’t drive the Dodge away from here. He couldn’t walk away from the diner onto a rural road past those cops, because they’d want to have a word with him.

The diner’s parking area was across the front and both sides. The Dodge and the cops were to the right. Parker stepped out the door and turned left, walking as though to his car. When he made it around the corner of the diner and out of sight of the cops waiting for him, he looked ahead and saw that behind the diner was a patch of weedy ground, and then scrub trees like the ones McWhitney had hoped to hide his pickup in among, and then a slope upward into more serious woods, some of them already rich with fall’s yellows and reds.

Casual but steady, Parker walked out away from the parking lot and toward the trees. No one noticed or called to him.

7

It starts with technology, but it still ends with tracker dogs.

At first, Parker climbed up the slope through the thin trunks of the second-growth trees, wanting only to get high enough to see without being seen. He moved left and right across the slope until he found a spot where he could look down and get a clear view of the diner and its parking lot. The Dodge was still there. So was the police car. He leaned against one of the thicker trees to wait and watch.

So the bank said they’d been hit for two million. He knew from experience that that would be a lie. Because of the insurance, the company that got taken down always pumped the loss by between a quarter and a third. The money hidden back in the church would be closer to one million five.

That was less than they’d expected. What would Dr. Madchen have gotten out of it, if things had worked the way they were supposed to work? A third of Jake’s third, less the piece for Briggs. Two hundred thousand at most, probably less. He was better off giving the wife a little injection.

Down below, one of the cops got out of the police car and went into the diner. It had been twenty minutes since Parker had come up here.

What he wanted to do now was wait for them to decide he’d gone away, seen their car, and decided to leave his own. Once they were gone, he could come back down and decide what to do next.

The cop was inside the diner ten minutes, and came out with a paper bag. He got back into his car, but it didn’t move. Which meant they weren’t going away. They were waiting for reinforcements. They were going to start the search from right down there.

Yes. When the police bus and the enclosed police van drove into the parking area a good half hour later, he knew what it meant, and turned away, moving uphill. He didn’t have to stick around long enough to see the hounds come out of that van.

Soon he heard them, though. There was an eager echo in their baying, as though they thought what they did was music.

Parker kept climbing. There was no way to know how high the hill was. He climbed to the north, and eventually the slope would start down the other side. He’d keep ahead of the dogs, and somewhere along the line he’d find a place to hole up. He could keep away from the pursuit until dark, and then he’d decide what to do next.

He kept climbing.

Table of 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