But when she walked into the living room, there was a troubled look on her face. “One’s for you.”
It was McWhitney. “Evening, Mr. Willis. I hope I’m not interrupting anything. This is Nelson, the bartender from McW, and I’m sorry to have to tell you you left your briefcase here. Your friend Sid found it and turned it over to me. He doesn’t want a reward or anything, but he and a few of his pals are waiting around outside to be sure everything’s okay. I hope to hear from you soon. I hope there wasn’t anything valuable in there.”
5
Parker had had enough. But he knew this was exactly the kind of situation that makes an angry man impatient, an impatient man careless, and a careless man a convict. He was angry, but he would control it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I got to ask you to drive me to the city.”
She gave him a curious look. “But that’s the place we went to, isn’t it? Where I met Sandra.”
“Right.”
“But that’s out on Long Island.”
“I’ll take a train.”
“You will not,” she said. “Come on, let’s go.”
“One minute,” he said, and went through to the pantry, where he took down from a shelf an unopened box of Bisquick. He turned it over and the bottom had been opened and reclosed. He popped it open and shook out, wrapped in a chamois, a Beretta Bobcat in the seven-shot .22, a twelve-ounce pocket automatic, which he put in his right pants pocket, then returned the chamois to the box and the box to the shelf.
Claire had her coat on, standing by the door between kitchen and garage. Parker chose a loose dark car coat with several roomy pockets, and transferred the Bobcat to one of them. “Ready.”
As they went out to the car, she said, “You can tell me what this is along the way.”
“I will.”
He waited till they were away from the house, then said, “This is about doing something with that money.”
“Overseas. You told me.”
“That’s right. On his own, Nels talked to a guy he knew that could maybe do that, but Nels didn’t know him as well as he thought.”
“Is this Sid?”
“You mean Nels’s message just now. The guy’s name is Oscar Sidd. I’ve never seen him, but he’s been described to me. It turned out, when Nels went up to New England to get the money, Oscar Sidd followed him.”
“To see if he could get it all for himself.”
“That’s right. Sandra saw what he was up to, and cut him out of the play.”
“But now he’s back,” Claire said.
“He has to know the money’s somewhere around Nels. So what Nels was saying is, Oscar Sidd’s outside the bar with some friends of his, or some muscle he bought. To keep things quiet, he’s waiting out there until the other customers leave. Then they’ll go in and ask Nels where the money is. They’ll have plenty of time to ask.”
Claire nodded, watching the road. Full night was here now, oncoming traffic dimming its lights. “When will the customers leave?”
“On a Monday night in November? No later than nine o’clock.”
She looked at the dashboard clock, “It’s five-thirty.”
“We’ll get there.”
“Not if you take a train.”
“Nels will hold them off for a while. It won’t be that sudden.”
“That’s why I’ll drive you there.”
“You don’t want to be at that bar, not tonight. Or anywhere near it. Let me off a block away.”
“Fine. I can do that.”
“And don’t wait for me, Nels and I were going to make the money transfer tomorrow anyway. So you just let me off and go back.”
“I might stay in the city. Have dinner and go to a late show.”
“Good idea.”
“And if anything comes up, call me on my cell.” She looked at him and away, “All right?”
“Sure,” he said.
6
At eight thirty-five on this Monday night McW was the only establishment showing lights along this secondary commercial street in Bay Shore. Parker walked down the block toward the place, seeing a half dozen cars parked along both sidewalks, including, across the way and a little beyond McW, a black Chevy Tahoe parked some distance from the two nearest streetlights. There were some people sitting in the Tahoe, impossible to say how many.
The simplest thing for the problem at hand — and for the anger — would be to go over there and put the Bobcat to work, starting with the driver. But it was better to wait, to take it slow.
To begin with, the people in the Tahoe wouldn’t be likely to let somebody just come walking across the street toward them with his hand in his pocket. And he didn’t know what the situation was right now inside the bar. So he barely looked over at the Tahoe, but instead walked steadily on, both hands in his pockets, then turned in at McW.
Other than McWhitney, there were four men in the bar. On two stools toward the rear were a pair of fortyish guys in baseball caps, unzippered vinyl jackets, baggy jeans with streaks of plaster dust, and paint-streaked work boots; construction men extending the after-work beer a little too long, by the slow-motion way they talked and lifted their glasses and nodded their heads.
Closer along the bar was an older man in a snap-brim hat and light gray topcoat over a dark suit, with a small pepper-and-salt dog curled up asleep under the stool beneath him as he nursed a bronze-colored mixed drink in a short squat glass and slowly read the New York Sun; a dog walker with an evening to kill.
And on the other side, at a booth near the front, facing the door, sat a bulky guy in a black raincoat over a tweed sports jacket and blue turtleneck sweater, a tall glass of clear liquid and ice cubes on the table in front of him. This last one looked at Parker when he walked in, and then didn’t look at him, or at anything else.
“I’ll take a beer, Nels,” Parker called, and angled over to sit at the club-soda-drinker’s table, facing him. “Whadaya say?”
“What?” The guy was offended. “Who the hell are you?”
“Another friend of Oscar.”
The guy stiffened, but then shook his head. “I don’t know Oscar, and I don’t know you.”
Parker took the Bobcat from his pocket and put it on the table, then left it there with his hands resting on the tabletop to both sides, not too close, “That’s who I am,” he said. “You Oscar’s brother?”
The guy stared at the gun, not afraid of it, but as though waiting to see it move. “No,” he said, not looking up. “I got no brothers named Oscar.”
“Well, how important is Oscar to you, then? Important enough to die for?”
Now the guy did meet Parker’s eyes, and his own were scornful. “The only thing you’re gonna shoot off in here is your mouth,” he said. “You don’t want a lotta noise to wake the dog.”
Parker picked up the Bobcat and pushed its barrel into the guy’s sternum, just below the rib cage. “In my experience,” he said, “with a little gun like this, a body like yours makes a pretty good silencer.”
The guy had tried to shrink back when the Bobcat lunged at him, but was held by the wooden back of the booth. His hands shot up and to the sides, afraid to come closer to the gun. He stared at Parker, disbelieving and believing both at once.
McWhitney arrived, with a draft beer he put on the table out of the way of them both as he said, calmly, “How we doing, gents?”
“Barman,” Parker said, keeping his eyes on the guy’s face and the Bobcat in his sternum, “reach inside my pal there and take out his piece.”