Parker got out, stiff in a lot of his body, and put the Terrier away, as Mackey came back from the closed door, looking at his watch. “Still too early to call Brenda,” he said, “with that block on her calls, so we can’t get out of here yet.”
“We need sleep,” Parker said. “We’ll stay here now, leave this afternoon.”
Mackey nodded. “That’s probably a good idea.”
Williams said, “I’m taking off. I’m too itchy, man, I wanna get out of here.”
Mackey said, “You got a place to go?”
“Out of this state,” Williams told him, “then south, then I don’t know.”
Parker said, “You don’t have the money you thought you’d have.”
“I’ll promote some.”
Mackey said, “You want to take the Honda?”
Williams raised an eyebrow at him. “Yeah?”
“If it belonged to anybody,” Mackey s aid, “it belonged to those other guys. Brenda’s got wheels and Parker’s gonna ride with us.”
“Then I’ll do it,” Williams said. “Thanks.”
Mackey said, “You sure you don’t want to get some sleep first?”
“The other side of the state line,” Williams told him, “I’ll sleep like a baby.”
“Then go for it,” Mackey said.
Mackey opened the overhead door again, and Williams backed the Honda out into early dawn. He waved at them through the windshield, and Mackey slid the door shut.
Upstairs, in the former offices, is where they’d set up temporary housing for themselves, with cots, each of the six of them with his own room. Parker and Mackey went up there now, and Parker took off only his shoes before he lay down, Terrier under pillow, and went immediately to sleep. He woke reaching for the Terrier, but it was Mackey who’d come into the room, saying, “They arrested Brenda.”
Four
1
“Give me a minute,” Parker said.
The functioning men’s room was upstairs. Parker washed face and hands, then looked at his watch. Not quite nine-thirty; he’d been asleep less than three hours.
When he went downstairs, Williams was back, and so was the Honda. Williams and Mackey sat at the conference table with containers of coffee and a bag of doughnuts; Parker sat with them. “I thought you were gone,” he said to Williams.
“I thought so, too,” Williams said.
“He heard it on the radio,” Mackey explained. “So he turned around and came back.”
Williams’ smile was weak. “I was almost to the state line,” he said.
Parker looked at him. “Why didn’t you keep going?”
“If it wasn’t for you people,” Williams said, “I’d still be in Stoneveldt, and then someplace worse after that, the rest of my life. That’s one. You said, ‘Take the Honda, we don’t need it,’ that’s two. You two make no difference between me and each other, that’s three.”
“Three’s all we need,” Mackey told him. “Tell Parker what you heard on the radio.”
“I had it tuned in to a news station,” Williams said, “to help me know what to watch for. They described everything in the Armory — they had our route pretty good — and they said they were pretty sure it was you and me, escaped from prison, that was part of the gang, because Tom Marcantoni was one of the guys they found dead.”
“All three dead,” Mackey said. “Like we thought.”
“Then they came on,” Williams said, “they said they had an arrest, I thought it was gonna be you two, but then they said it was a woman. Then I thought, it’s Maryenne, it’s my sister they’re after because I called her that one time, but it isn’t. They describe a white woman, and say the only name they have is an alias, Brenda Fawcett.”
Parker shook his head. “What are they doing with Brenda? She was asleep in her hotel with a do not disturb.”
“That’s the bitch of it,” Mackey said. “She wasn’t. She pulled that trick again, that thing she does, where she hangs around near me in case I need help.”
Parker said, “She was out there?”
“Most of the night,” Mackey said. “Maybe a block away. If we could have reached her, she could have come right over in a minute.”
“You told her,” Parker said, “she was gonna make trouble for herself doing that one of these days.”
“And when she went back to the hotel,” Mackey said, “after we busted out and set off that siren, somebody saw her go in. But that isn’t what did it.”
Williams said, “Somebody else turned her in. The woman that runs the dance studio.”
“I’m sorry now,” Mackey said, “we didn’t bust her goddam mirror.”
Parker said, “The woman in the dance studio? What’s she got to do with anything? And what’ve they got on Brenda that they’re gonna pull her in?”
Williams said, “What they said on the radio, Brenda went to this dance studio a few times, took lessons, paid cash, gave a phony name, used phony ID.”
“Now they’re saying,” Mackey said, “she was casing the joint. For us.”
Williams said, “So this woman runs the dance studio, Darlene Something, one of those two-name things, she followed Brenda one time, see where she really lives, so when the cops call her this morning, tell her the dance studio’s all messed up, or where we come through, she says, ‘It’s Brenda Fawcett, she’s part of it.’ And they go pick her up.”
“And find,” Mackey said, “a lot of fake ID I gave her a while back, just like to goof with.”
“So now she’s the brains of the gang,” Williams said, “and they want her to tell them where the rest of us are.”
“Parker,” Mackey said, “I gotta get her out of there.”
“I know that,” Parker said.
“The radio says,” Williams told them, “they’re holding her at the Fifth Street station, until they find out who she really is and what she knows about the rest of us.”
Mackey asked him, “Do you know this Fifth Street station?”
Williams grinned. “I put up there a couple times,” he said. “It isn’t the city jail, it’s more of a holding tank kind of place. Connected to a precinct. You’re there, and then they move you on to some place real, once they decide where you should go.”
Mackey said, “Any place else would be tougher.”
“Fifth Street isn’t easy,” Williams assured him.
“But you know the place,” Mackey said. “You can give us the layout.” Turning to Parker, he said, “We gotta get her out of there today. She isn’t gonna like that place.”
Parker didn’t say anything. Mackey was about to turn back to Williams, but then he frowned at Parker. “Are you saying you aren’t in this?”
Parker didn’t want to be in it, he wanted to get away from this place, get back east, spend some time with Claire, decide what to do next. He’d been nailed to the floor here too long. He didn’t have that feeling of obligation that had sent Mackey to give him a hand when he needed to get out of Stoneveldt, or that had made Williams turn around at the state line and come back into the pit he’d spent all this time crawling out of.
Parker didn’t live by debts accumulated and paid off; but there were times when you had to do things you didn’t want, be places you didn’t want. He could stand up now and walk out of here and head east, and there’d be no problem, not now. Neither of these people would shoot him in the back as he got to the door. But somewhere down the line, Mackey would think about him again, and he’d have a different kind of IOU in his mind. Parker didn’t collect the IOUs, neither the good ones nor the bad ones, but he knew he had to live among people with those tote boards in their minds.