Nobody Runs Forever

by Richard Stark

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

  9

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So far.”

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

  “They’ll call me.”

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

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

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

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

  “She could have folded the hand.”

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

  “We’re keeping her at a distance.”

  “Good.”

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

  “The checking account is getting low.”

  “I’ll get some cash, later on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Not yet.”

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

  “What kind?”

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

  10

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

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

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

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

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

  “Jake Beckham.”

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

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

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

  “Thanks.”

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

  Dalesia said, “Tell him it’s Nick.”

  “He says it’s Nick.”

  Dalesia said, “Could I talk to him?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Maybe so.”

  “Or airlift them.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Then there’s no job,” Parker said.

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

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

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

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

  “What does he know, this doctor?”

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

  “Does he know what the score is?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “We believe that, Jake.”

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

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

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

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

  “Still a private room?”

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

  “You’re going in Monday.”

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

  Dalesia said, “Parker? Okay?”

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

  “It is good,” Beckham insisted.

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

  11

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

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

  She looked doubtful. “With good food?”

  “You want good food and a terrace?”

  She laughed. “You’re right. Come with me while I look a
t my hair. We got a very strange wrong number this morning.”

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

  “He asked for somebody called Harbin.”

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

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

  “Perfect,” he said.

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

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

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

  “Which Harbin would that be?”

  “The Harbin from Cincinnati.”

  “Don’t know the guy, sorry.”

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

  “I don’t.”

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

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

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

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

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

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