“I think I did,” McWhitney said, and beat the side of his fist gently on the table. “I think I probably saw her, maybe a few times. What do you think to yourself when you see that? ‘There’s a good-looking blonde.’ Not, ‘There’s the good-looking blonde I saw yesterday.’ You aren’t looking in that kind of way.”
Dalesia, as though grudgingly, said, “That’s true, I guess. Good looks can make a woman anonymous.” He grinned at McWhitney, apparently deciding to make nice. “Anybody looks at an ugly beak like you two days in a row,” he said, “they’re gonna notice.”
Parker said, “What does she want, that’s the question.”
“Good,” McWhitney said, rather than have to answer Dalesia. “You tell us. What does she want? She can’t still be waiting for her partner to show up.”
Dalesia said to Parker, “You saw her before, when Keenan braced you, but you didn’t talk to her.”
“No, Keenan used her as a decoy to get me in position where he could suddenly show up. Then she left. He said her job was to be somewhere around, out of sight with a three fifty-seven Magnum.”
“Christ on a crutch,” McWhitney said.
Dalesia said, “So that’s what happened. Keenan went into Nels’s bar, and this Sandra woman stayed outside as backup. Didn’t help him much, but there she is.”
As though reluctant to say it, or to say much of anything, McWhitney told them, “He had a walkie-talkie in his pocket.”
Parker said, “But he didn’t use it.”
“He didn’t get the chance.”
Dalesia said, “That was at night. What, around eleven?”
“A little earlier. That bar doesn’t get a late-night bunch, not even on weekends.”
Dalesia said, “All right. Whatever happened between you and Keenan happened that night. Then what? In the morning, you came out to look for me?”
“Yeah, I went to Stratton first, and got you from him. Told him I wanted to bring you in on a job.”
Dalesia laughed. “You sure did.”
Parker said, “When you leave there, does anybody else live in the building?”
“No, I’ve just got this guy comes in to open and close the bar, run the place. He’s got a home to go to.”
“So when you left,” Parker said, “this woman followed you until you landed somewhere, until she could leave you for a while, and then she went back and tossed your place. What did she find?”
“Nothing!” McWhitney looked as though he might get insulted.
Parker shook his head. “Come on, Nelson,” he said. “This woman’s a pro, she’s at least as much a professional as Keenan was. She went into your place when it was empty. She didn’t have a lot of time because she had to get back in position behind you, but she spent a little time, and what did she find?”
McWhitney furrowed his brow, thinking. He wasn’t thinking about what the woman had found; he was thinking about what he would say. “All right,” he said. “She found some patted-down dirt in the cellar. And she found some empty acid bottles. That’s all.”
“She didn’t find any walkie-talkies, any wallets.”
“I’m not a complete idiot,” McWhitney said. “You want to find those things, you have to walk into Long Island Sound.”
Dalesia said, “Parker, go back to your question. What does she want?”
McWhitney said, “She wants to know what happened to her guy.”
“I don’t think so,” Parker said. “She knows Keenan is dead. She’s not gonna be into revenge, or justice, or take care of your partner, or any of that. She’s a pro. She’s here because she wants something else.”
Dalesia said, “Maybe she just wants to know what we’re all up to.”
McWhitney, growling again, said, “We all know what she wants. It’s the same as ever. She wants Harbin.”
They studied that. “The reward,” Dalesia said. “It’s still the reward. We’re busy over here, and she’s still working her agenda.”
McWhitney said, “She thinks what’s going on, we’re protecting Harbin. We think Harbin is in the past, she thinks he’s in the present.”
Parker walked to the door, opened it, looked out, saw running lights now on the trucks streaming along the highway. He shut the door and said, “We can’t have her here when we’re working.”
Dalesia looked at McWhitney, who nodded, then shrugged. “I always think,” he said, “it’s a waste to kill a good-looking woman.” He shrugged again. “But we live in a wasteful world.”
9
The phone rang. Parker opened his eyes, and the LED readout on the bedside clock radio read 2:17. The red numbers also gave enough light so he could see the phone. He unhooked it, put it between pillow and ear while he looked around to be sure nothing had changed since he’d switched the lights out, and said, “Yes.”
It was McWhitney’s voice: “Your Sandra’s here. She drew down on me. She wants a meet, the four of us. She says, don’t bring a gun.”
“Of course I’ll bring a gun.”
Sitting up, Parker kicked the crumpled newspapers away from the bed while he listened to McWhitney breathe and then say, “Hold on.”
There were faint voices away from the phone in McWhitney’s room, and then the clatter of the receiver being put down; and then a female voice, hoarse and impatient, said, “If you carry it in your hand, I’ll kill you. If you carry it in your pocket, what’s the point?”
“I don’t leave home without it.”
“If you make me nervous,” she said, “it won’t be good.”
He had nothing to say to that, and after a bit the receiver clattered again and then McWhitney said, “I gotta call Nick.”
“I’ll be there.”
Parker walked down the line of green motel doors. Off to the right, the running lights on the highway had thinned out but still drew a yellow-white-red scarf across the throat of the night.
Ahead of him, a door opened. He paused, but it was Dalesia coming out. He saw Parker, grinned, and said, “The lady’s taking things into her own hands.”
“I don’t need this,” Parker said. Twenty-four hours from now, they would be waiting for the armored cars. No, Parker would be at the stop sign, waiting for Elaine Langen and the number of the truck they’d want.
“Nobody needs it,” Dalesia said, as they walked down the line together. “But it’s what we got.”
Dalesia knocked, and the door was opened by McWhitney. He was barefoot, wearing dark trousers with a white T-shirt hanging loose, and his expression was disgusted. “Do you believe this shit?”
They entered, and the hard-faced blonde was seated at the round table, which she’d pulled back into the front corner opposite the door, leaving the hanging swag light to dangle over air. She wore black leather slacks and boots, a bright green high-neck sweater, and a black leather jacket with exaggerated shoulders. Her left hand was on the table, palm down. Her right hand held a pistol, loosely, pointed no-where, its butt on the back of her left hand.
“Come in, gentlemen,” she said. “I like you all over there.”
Meaning the diagonally far corner of the room, straight back from the door. They went over and stood in a row, leaning their backs against the rear wall of the room, the bathroom door immediately to their left, and the bed beyond it.
McWhitney said, “Okay, we’re all here. Just say it.”
“I’ve got a mortgage,” she said, “on a nice little house on the Cape. I’m helping to keep my friend’s daughter in private school. I made good money with Roy Keenan, all in all, sometimes fat, sometimes thin, but now that’s done.”
Dalesia said, “You need another Roy Keenan.”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, “I was always better than he was, and we both knew it. The way the business works, it was better for him to be in front. I’ll find another front man, that isn’t the problem. The problem is, the current job. I need it for my cash flow, before I can move on to something else, but there’s been too much time wasted on it.”