“So could I, pal. What kinda car am I looking for?”
“I’ll recognize you,” Parker said.
Of course he didn’t show up, but neither did Parker. The voice had said he could make it to this neighborhood in an hour, so forty-five minutes after the call, Parker took up a position at the diner across the road from the Mobil station and a little farther on toward Pennsylvania. From where he sat, he was unobtrusive, but he could see everything that drove by the Mobil station, and after two hours not one red Chevy Suburban had done so. There were no pedestrians out here along this country road through pine woods, so there was nothing for him to watch for but a car, and none showed up.
Had the guy lied about his car, or was he hanging even farther back somewhere behind Parker or down the other way, eastward, toward New York?
Who had the other people been at that meeting? Parker had never met any of them before except Nick Dalesia. What were their names? Stratton, their host, was the one Dalesia had known, who had invited Dalesia in. McWhitney was the one who’d brought the wired Harbin, but had sworn he hadn’t known about it. The other two were Fletcher and Mott.
This gravelly voice on the phone was none of those, but he had to be connected to one of them. At this point, he could represent either side of the law.
But whatever he represented, Parker wanted nothing to do with him and didn’t want to have to spend a lot of time on him. This week wasn’t so bad, but after this week the bank job could happen on any day. He needed to find out who this guy was, who he was connected to, and what he wanted. And then he needed, one way or another, to make him go away.
Two hours and fifteen minutes outside the diner. It was now three hours since the call. Parker started the Lexus and drove away from there, not seeing any sudden activity in his mirrors.
He drove to the turnoff at the lake road, made the turn, and then drove very slowly, watching the intersection back there. He was almost around the first curve to the left, which would block the view, when a small black car made the turn into his mirror.
He accelerated around the curve, then slowed again. This road went all the way around the lake, partly straightaways and partly left-leaning curves, and then came back out onto the state highway two miles farther west.
Because he’d accelerated into the curve, then slowed, the small black car was closer when it next appeared, but it immediately braked, its nose dipping, then came on more slowly, trying to hang farther back.
It was the stutter that said this was no civilian. Parker drove on past his own driveway, with the mailbox marked WILLIS, the name Claire used around here. Behind him, the black car kept pace, well back.
At the far end of the lake was a clubhouse Parker had never entered. The summer people used it for a number of things; then it was open weekends only, in fall and spring. It was closed now, the vehicles of a few maintenance workers clustered up against the low clapboard building. Parker turned in there, stopped among the other parked cars, and watched the black car, a Honda Accord with the mud of many miles on it, stream steadily by. The driver, alone in the car, was a woman. It was hard to see her face, because she was talking on a cell phone.
Parker pulled out of the lot and followed the Honda, pacing it the way she had paced him. She must have seen him back there but did nothing about it, kept a steady thirty-four miles an hour all the way around the lake, signaled for a right at the state highway, and turned north, toward the Mobil station.
And beyond. He followed her across the bridge at the Delaware Water Gap and into a mall on the other side. She drove to the parking area in front of a supermarket, left the car, went into the store. She was tall and slender, very blonde, in heels and jeans and black suede jacket over fluffy pink sweater. She looked urban, not rural.
Parker circled once, then took the nearest empty space, behind the Honda in the next row. He switched off the engine, sat there to wait, and a red Chevy Suburban pulled in next to him.
The gun Parker kept spring-clipped under the Lexus driver’s seat was a small and lightweight .25 automatic, a Firearms International Beretta Jetfire—not much use beyond arm’s reach but very handy in close. As a bulky guy got out of the Chevy on the far side from Parker and came around the front of his car, Parker reached under the seat, snapped the Beretta into his palm, and rested that hand in his lap.
The guy coming toward him wore black work pants, a dark blue dress shirt, an open maroon vinyl zippered jacket, and a self-satisfied smile. He had a big shaven head, a thick neck, small ears that curled in on themselves. He looked like a strikebreaker, everybody’s muscle, but at the same time he was somehow more than that. Or different from that.
As Parker thumbed open his window, the guy came up to the car, leaned his forearms on the open windowsill, smiled in and said, “How we doing today?” It was the gravel voice from the phone call.
Parker showed him the Beretta. “One step back; I don’t want blood on the car.”
The guy took the step back, but he also gave a surprised laugh and stuck his hands up in the referee’s time-out signal, saying, “Hold on, pal, it’s too late for that.”
Too late? Parker rested the Beretta on the windowsill, his eyes on the other’s eyes and hands, and waited.
The guy nodded toward the supermarket. “Sandra’s already been on the horn with the DMV. Claire Willis, East Shore Road, Colliver’s Pond, New Jersey oh-eight-nine-eight-nine. Why don’t you wanna have a nice little talk?”
“You’re not law,” Parker said.
The guy shook his head. “Never said I was.”
Being with a partner, running a license through Motor Vehicles, having all the time in the world for a stakeout, not particularly impressed by the sight of a handgun. “You’re a bounty hunter.”
“You got it in one, my friend,” the guy said, grinning, proud of either himself or Parker. “If you’re not gonna blow my head off, I can reach in my jacket pocket for my card case, give you my card.”
“Go ahead.”
“Not that a Beretta like that’s gonna blow anybody’s head off,” the guy said, reaching into his jacket, coming out with a card case. “Though it would make a dent, I’ll give you that.”
He extended a card, holding it flat between the first two fingers of his outstretched right hand. Parker put the Beretta hand in his lap again, held the card in his left, and read, Roy Keenan Associates and, under that, in smaller lettering, Tracer of Lost Persons. There was an 800 number, but no office address.
“Sandra’s the ‘Associates,’” Keenan said. “What she walks around with mostly is an S and W three fifty-seven. I don’t see her at the moment, but it could be she could see us.”
“You people like to talk.”
“Yes, we do,” Keenan said, with another comfortable smile. Then he said, “Oh, I see, you mean she won’t be quick enough on the trigger. You may be right, but what the hell, pal, here we both are. Why not let me say what I have to say, listen to what you have to say, if there’s anything you want to talk about, and then you’re done with me, and we don’t have a lot of three fifty-seven Magnum bullets flying around a parking lot.”
“We’ll talk in your car,” Parker decided.
That made him laugh again. “Still worried about bloodstains, are you? Come along.”
12
The interior of the Chevy was laid out almost like a police car—a hunter’s car, anyway. An over-under shotgun was attached by clips to the under part of the roof, and extra radios and scanners filled the space between the driveshaft hump and the bottom of the dashboard. The rear side windows were tinted glass with metal mesh inside, which would be for when a prisoner was in the backseat.
Keenan sat at the wheel, engine off and windows open, Parker to his right, hand in his pocket with the Beretta. Parker said, “You want to talk.”
“Well, you know what I want to talk about,” Keenan said, “I want to talk about Michael Maurice Harbin.”
“I didn’t know those other names.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“I believe that,” Keenan said. “But I also believe one of the other fellas at that table just might know where he is. So the way it looks from here, if I’m going to find Michael Maurice, who has just absolutely vanished from the face of the Earth, I’m going to first have to find the rest of you guys from the meeting.”
“Starting with me?”
“Well, no.” Keenan gazed thoughtfully out the windshield. “I started with Alfred Stratton. He was the one rented the room, and I noticed he used a false name and ID to do it, which slowed me down a little. But that was pretty interesting.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want his wife to know he plays poker.”
“Maybe. He used a credit card in that phony name, though, that’s pretty far to go for peace with the missus.”
“Not impossible,” Parker said.
“Well, let’s just say that’s something else outside my need to know,” Keenan said. “I know there was a meeting. I know Stratton called it, and Harbin was there. Stratton has disappeared just about as completely as Harbin, so maybe they’re both together, time will tell. But I got my hands on Stratton’s phone bills, and the only thing interesting there was two calls to a guy named Nicholas Dalesia, who it turns out has something of a record as a heister.”
“Is that so.”
“Not that I care. Anyway, I’ve been trying to make contact with this guy Dalesia, but so far no luck.”
“Another disappearance?”
“No, he’s around, but he’s in and out, he seems to be a very busy man, I just haven’t managed to touch base with him yet. But I did get to his phone bill, and there’s not much on it, but there’s a call to somebody in New Jersey named Willis.” With a sidelong look at Parker, he said, “You wouldn’t be named Willis, would you?”
“Not usually,” Parker said.
“I thought not. Anyway, there’s three other guys at that meeting I haven’t tracked down yet, so it could be you could help me on that side. Or you might have some idea where I could find out a little more about our friend Harbin, who, after all, is the only and sole point of my entire inquiry.”
“Maybe he’s dead,” Parker said.
“Show me where to dig.”
“Or maybe not.”
“Dead doesn’t bother me,” Keenan said. “If I can show proof of death, I collect just as much as if I walked in with the miscreant on the hoof. Mr. Not-Willis, my usual livelihood comes from overly trusting bail bondsmen, but now and again some government reward money comes along that’s rich enough to cause me to change my diet. I don’t know what Harbin did or didn’t do, but there’s both state and federal paper out on him, and the combined jackpot is enough to get Keenan and Associates on the trail.”
“Then I’m sorry I’m wasting your time,” Parker said.
“Those other guys at the meeting.”
Parker shook his head. “New to me. I believe they were new to Nick Dalesia, too, except for Stratton. Stratton called him and invited him. Then Nick called and invited me. He said I wouldn’t know anybody else there, and he was right. Nothing came of the meeting, it turned out we weren’t going to work anything out after all, so we went our separate ways.”
“I spend much of my life,” Keenan said, “wishing I’d been the fly on this or that wall. Mr. Not-Willis, far be it from me to cause you to leave bloodstains here and there around the world, but I want you to know, I am not going to be satisfied until I have my hands on either Michael Maurice Harbin or some certain sure proof of his death. I don’t suppose you can help me find Nick Dalesia, either.”
“He travels around a lot, he’s a busy man.”
“So I’m finding out.” Keenan shook his head. “I know we’d both like it,” he said, “if I could guarantee you we’d never see one another again, but I’m too much at sea here to say never again. You keep thinking about Michael Maurice, and any way at all that you could be of help to me, so that if, just if, I find I have to stop by and speak with you again, we don’t have to spend a lot of time scaring each other with firearms.”
“Goodbye,” Parker said, and got out of the Chevy.
13
The problem was, what to do about Keenan? It would be best if nothing had to be done, at least not by Parker. If Keenan’s search for Harbin would lead him sooner rather than later to McWhitney, the one who’d brought Harbin to the meeting, that would take care of it. McWhitney would at least keep Keenan busy for a while, and might even get rid of him. Somebody might eventually have to get rid of Keenan, one way or another. Having a bounty hunter rooting around in the background while they put together a bank job would not be a good thing.
What did Keenan know, and what didn’t he know, and what did his knowledge mean? He knew there had been a meeting of seven men who weren’t well known to one another. He knew Harbin was one of them, and he knew Harbin disappeared after that meeting. He knew there were rewards out for Harbin, sufficient to bring somebody like himself sniffing around.
But what didn’t he know? The purpose of the meeting. The backgrounds of the people who were there. He had some low-level tipster somewhere in law enforcement, but he wasn’t hooked in with the law in any major way. He could not have heard the tape, and so he probably didn’t even know that Harbin had gone to the meeting wired.
All of which meant that Keenan wasn’t getting much by way of help or input from the law. He was a freebooter, on his own, developing his sources and his information the hard, one-step-at-a-time way. If it became necessary to get rid of him, no lawman would care, or no more than usual.
As Parker had told Keenan, Dalesia was hard to get hold of. He had a phone but never answered it, had no machine on it, used it only for outgoing calls if he happened to be home. Parker could reach him eventually by sending a message to whoever was at that fax number Dalesia had given Elaine Langen. It would be good to let Dalesia know that this guy was lurking in the underbrush, but would it be necessary?
He hadn’t decided that question when he’d finished the drive back from the conversation with Keenan, but then it turned out the decision had been made for him. He came into the house, found Claire in her swimsuit just coming in from the lake, and she said, “Nick called. He left a number where you could call him, at six, or seven, or eight.”
It was now quarter past five. The number Dalesia had left would be a pay phone. “I’ll call him at six,” Parker said.
Outside the Mobil station where he’d waited in vain to see the Chevy Suburban was the phone-on-a-stick Parker used when he wanted to make a call that wouldn’t be monitored for training purposes. He got there just at six with a pocketful of change and dialed the number in upstate New York, and Dalesia answered on the first ring: “We got an event.”
“So have I,” Parker said. “Would yours be the same one? A guy named Keenan?”
“No, mine is Jake Beckham. He was shot.”
“Shot?” That made no sense. “The husband?”
“He’s not that kind.”
“How bad is he?”
“Hit in the leg, above the knee.”
“In the hospital?”
“Yeah, for a couple weeks. Actually, it’s not that far from where we wanted him, only now he’s gonna have a limp.”
“This isn’t what we wanted,” Parker said. “We didn’t want the law looking at him, wondering what he’s been up to lately, what did he have on the fire, who’s he been hanging around with.”
“That’s true,” Dalesia said. “We also didn’t want Jake’s reading on the thing.”
“Reading? What do you mean, reading?”
“Well,” Dalesia said, “he thinks you did it.”
; TWO
1
Gwen Reversa had decided to change her first name from Wendy even before she knew she was going to be a cop. The name Wendy just didn’t lend itself to the kind of respect she felt she deserved. Wendys were thought of as blondes, i.e., airheads. Well, Gwen Reversa, now Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, Massachusetts CID, couldn’t help it if she was a blonde, but she could help being a Wendy.
It was in a name-your-baby book that she learned that Wendy wasn’t even a proper name all by itself, though that’s what her mother had picked for her and that’s what it said on the birth certificate. But Wendy was actually a nickname, for Gwendolyn.
Well. Once she’d discovered that, it was nothing at all to switch herself from a nickname without gravitas—Wendy—to a nickname with: Gwen. She was now twenty-eight, and at this stage in her life only her immediate family and a few early pals from grade school even remembered she’d once been a Wendy, and she was pretty sure they usually forgot.
“Detective Second Grade Gwen Reversa, CID,” she told the wounded man in the hospital bed, and he wheezed a little, nodded his head on the pillow, and said, “Glad to see ya.” Would he be glad to see a Wendy? Nah.
“You feel strong enough to talk, Mr. Beckham?”
“Sure, if I had anything to say,” he told her. “They missed my lung by about three feet.”
She laughed, mostly to put him at his ease, and pulled over one of the room’s two chrome-and-green-vinyl chairs. Since he was a crime victim, and the perp might be interested in a follow-up question, Mr. Jake Beckham was in a private room.
Gwen took two notebooks and a pen from her shoulder bag, then put the bag on the floor and moved the chair so the shoulder bag strap looped around one leg, which is how you learned to keep control of your bag when you had a gun in it. Then she sat on the chair, opened one of the notebooks, and said, “Want to tell me about it?”
Nobody Runs Forever Page 5