Then he saw it was McWhitney, one of the guys from Al Stratton’s meeting, the one who’d carried Harbin away, and he grinned as he walked over and opened the driver’s door to say, “You’re just the guy I’m looking for.”
McWhitney showed him the automatic in his right hand and said, “I don’t think I am, Nick. Get in.”
Something’s wrong, Dalesia thought, and he thought, something’s wrong with me. I didn’t expect him, I didn’t know why he was all of a sudden in my car, and I just walked up to him grinning like an idiot, as though nobody’d ever been dangerous to anybody in the whole history of the world.
I’m still alive, anyway, Dalesia thought, as he got behind the wheel. Maybe this is only bad, not worse than bad.
Since he had the stupid smile on his face anyway, he left it there and said, “What’s wrong? Nelson, isn’t it?” I don’t even know this guy, he told himself, and I walked right up to him. I deserve whatever I get.
McWhitney said, “I just have one question, Nick.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“Why’d you wise off?”
“I’m sorry?” Thinking, this son of a bitch is gonna kill me for a mistake, an error, he said, “Wise off to who? About what?”
“Oh, you been talking to a lot of people?”
“I haven’t been talking to anybody,” Dalesia said. “Except Parker. You don’t mean Parker.”
McWhitney looked uncertain, and then certain again. “I don’t give a shit about you and Parker,” he said. “I mean you and Roy Keenan.”
“Never heard of him,” Dalesia said, because he never had.
Now McWhitney was angry. “Never heard of him? You talked to the guy about Mike Harbin and you never heard of him?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Dalesia said, “you mean the bounty hunter.”
“Oh, you do know him.”
“No, and I don’t want to. Parker told me about him. He found Parker, but Parker brushed him off. He says the guy doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t even think he ever heard the tape Harbin made.”
McWhitney frowned mightily. “Keenan never talked to you.”
“Never.”
“He did talk to Parker.”
“He’s looking for all of us,” Dalesia said. “He’s looking for you, too, because there’s some kind of reward money on Harbin. But he doesn’t know anything.”
“He found me,” McWhitney said.
Dalesia looked at the automatic, now resting in McWhitney’s lap. “Is that why the hardnose?”
McWhitney sighed and slipped the automatic out of sight under his jacket. “I’ll tell you what happened,” he said. “I fell for an old one.”
“Yeah?”
“This guy Keenan, he comes to me, he says you told him he should ask me where to find Harbin.”
Dalesia laughed. “Why would I do that?”
“That was my question. What were you up to. But it wasn’t you up to something, it was Keenan. That’s the old dodge, he tells me you told him this thing or that thing, then I’m supposed to figure it’s okay to tell him more.”
“He had no idea what was going on.”
“None,” McWhitney agreed.
“So that was a big mistake he made.”
“Yeah, it was.”
Dalesia grinned. “I bet he learned a lesson from it.”
“Yeah.” McWhitney nodded. “He learned the harp.”
THREE
1
I like retirement,” Briggs said. “Turns out, I was nervous all those years.”
“You looked nervous,” Parker said.
And it was true; Briggs looked calmer than the last time Parker had seen him, after a broken heist where Dalesia had been the driver, Parker and Tom Hurley and a guy called Michaelson had been the doers, and Briggs the explosives man, fussy and petulant but very methodical behind his thick spectacles. When an alarm had gone off that hadn’t been in the plan they’d been sold, Michaelson wound up dead, Hurley went off for revenge, but the guy who’d sold them the plan had disappeared forever, and Briggs decided he’d had enough. “I’m running a streak,” he’d said. “A very bad streak. I believe I’ll just retire for a while, and wait for it to go away.”
He’d already had this house in Florida, not on either coast but inland, on a lake near Winter Garden. He had a wife, too, but she wouldn’t be coming out to see their visitor, and Parker wouldn’t be going inside the house. He and Briggs sat on a patio in front of one corner of the low, broad house, facing the lake glittering like a diamond pin out there, where motorboats snarled and white sailboats slid silently among them at a slant.
Watching the movement on the lake, Parker said, “You like things calm. No commotion.”
“We get commotion sometimes,” Briggs said. He’d put on a few pounds but was still basically a thin unathletic man who looked as though he belonged behind a desk. Nodding at the lake, he said, “A few years ago, a tornado came across from the Gulf, bounced down onto the lake, looked as though it was coming straight here, lifted up just before it hit the shore, we watched the tail twist as it went right over the house, watched it out that picture window there. That was enough commotion for a while.”
Parker said, “You watched it out a picture window?”
Briggs either shrugged or shivered; it was hard to tell which. “Afterwards, we said to each other, that was really stupid.”
“So you want to stay retired,” Parker said.
“The last time we met,” Briggs said, “we were crawling through a tunnel with alarms going off. Michaelson got shot. I don’t want any more of that.”
“Let me tell you what I’ve got,” Parker said. “I don’t need you there, when it goes down. I need materiel.”
Briggs looked doubtful. “You want me to sell stuff to you?”
“I want you to provide it,” Parker told him, “for a piece of the pie. Come along and show how it works, but then be somewhere else when it’s going down.”
“What materiel do you need?”
“I need to stop three armored cars, and open one more.”
“That’s a lot of armored cars.”
Parker told him the setup, and Briggs said, “Using them as roadblocks, that’s nice.”
“You’re the one knows what would work.”
“Well, a lot of things would work,” Briggs said. “I’ll tell you something I can get my hands on. You know the Carl-Gustaf?”
“Sounds like a king.”
“It’s an antitank gun, made by the Swedes, ever since the Second World War. It’s heavy, but you won’t be carrying it except in cars.”
“How heavy?”
“Thirty-six pounds, a little over four feet long. It’s eighty-four millimeter, shoots different kinds of rounds, including antitank. The antitank shell is almost six pounds all by itself.”
“It sounds old,” Parker said.
“But it’s still in use,” Briggs assured him. “The NATO countries used it a lot. Singapore’s got two hundred of them right now, Uganda uses them. There’s a place in India makes the ammunition.”
Parker said, “And you can get hold of some of these Carl-Gustafs.”
Grinning, Briggs said, “I’m retired, but not that much. The difficult part, these days, you start dealing in arms, the feds figure you’re probably hooked up with terrorists. Makes it hard for a private guy to get along. But the good thing is, I know people who have materiel they’re afraid to move, because anybody they talk to could turn out to be undercover. And one of these people I know has Carl-Gustafs.”
“Could you get them to New England by October fourth?”
Briggs considered. “Five days from now? I’ll drive them up in my van.”
“Good. One of the people with us manages a motel, we can put you there without paper, so you never left home.”