McWhitney, surly and rebellious, said, “What the fuck do we care about your problems for?”
“You made my problems,” she said. “That asshole Harbin should have been in our kill jar weeks ago. There’s no way for him to go that far out of sight and still be breathing. It’s been obvious for a long time that one of you put him down and knows where the remains are, and that’s all I need. I don’t need to point any fingers, I just need to get this job off the books.”
Parker said, “Why should we deal with you?”
“Because I’ve got dossiers on you,” she said. Pointing at McWhitney, she said, “I can give the law very good reasons to dig around in that cellar of yours.” To the others she said, “I don’t have convictable stuff on either of you, but I have interesting stuff, and I have every one of you in the room where Michael Harbin was last seen alive. I’m pretty sure you were all in that room to plan a robbery that then didn’t happen, for whatever reason, and I know damn well you’re all hanging around in this place because you’ve got some other robbery worked out.”
She lifted the gun hand and waved it, not threatening but betraying impatience, rubbing away their misconceptions. “I don’t give a shit what crimes you people get up to,” she said. “I know you’re wide boys, and I want nothing to do with your play, including informing on you. When I saw yesterday, you two in the pickup truck, that you’d made me, I knew it was time to come talk.”
“God damn it,” McWhitney said.
She said, “If you cold-shoulder me tonight, I’ll walk away and I’ll eat the loss, and I hate to walk away from time invested with no return. I hate it so much I’ll turn in those dossiers just out of spite. And if you think you can take me down, my friend has the dossiers and you’ll never find her, and she’ll know what to do with them the day I don’t phone in.”
Parker said, “To find a dyke on Cape Cod with a daughter in private school and a canary-yellow-haired roommate would not be impossible.”
Quietly, Dalesia said, “There’s three of us and one of her and it’s a small room.”
“No, fuck that,” McWhitney said. “Wait a minute, I’m trying to think.” But then he frowned at the woman and said, “Just to satisfy my curiosity, do you know why Harbin was wired?”
Parker said, “What difference does that make?”
“I just want to know.”
“So that’s what happened,” she said. “Somebody did have a handle on him, and you people found the wire.”
Disappointed, McWhitney said, “But you don’t know why it was there.”
“No, I get it,” she said. “I didn’t know he had it on, but it makes sense.” She gestured a little with the gun. “The state reward money on Harbin is for killing a trooper during the commission of a crime. The crime was smuggling, off the Jersey coast.”
“Drugs,” Dalesia said.
She nodded. “That’s what was coming in, from Central America, that’s what made it state. What made it federal was, what was going out was guns. You know, down there the rebels and the drug guys are all mixed together.”
Parker said, “That doesn’t add up. If they wired him, they know where he is, so how can there be reward money out on him?”
“One of the things that helps guys like you,” she said, “is, the law is a lot of little competing offices. Turf battles. So one bunch got hold of Harbin, and for a while they’d rather run him than turn him in. They don’t get the reward. And they know he’s got to do what they want for as long as they let him walk around loose. Like wear a wire whenever there’s a meet.”
“Turns out, they didn’t do him any favors,” McWhitney said. “Let me make you a suggestion. You go away for two days, just two days.”
“No,” she said.
Parker said to McWhitney, “Why? What are you offering?”
“Take it easy,” McWhitney told him, and turned back to the woman. “It happens,” he said, “I know where Harbin is.” Hastily he added, “I didn’t kill him, I just want you to know that. It doesn’t matter, but I just want you to know.”
“Noted,” she said. Clearly, to her it really didn’t matter.
“But I know,” McWhitney went on, “where he is. Take a powder out of here, lady, you’re too distracting. Give me a place to reach you, day after tomorrow, I’ll take you to where Harbin is. I’ll point and say there, and then you go your way and I go mine.”
The woman considered, then shook her head. “You just want two days to try to find my friend.”
Parker said, “No, McWhitney’s right. We’re busy. We’re too busy to go looking anywhere tomorrow or the next day. But after that, we got all the time in the world.”
Dalesia said, “Add two days to your cost-time equation. A small percentage, right?”
Again she thought it over, and this time she frowned at McWhitney and said, “The body’s available. It isn’t burned or at the bottom of the ocean.”
“There’s probably some acid damage,” said McWhitney.
She shook her head. “You and your acid. You going back to that bar, when you’re done here?”
“Oh, yeah.”
She got to her feet. “I’ll get in touch,” she said. “Don’t come outside for a few minutes.” And she walked sideways to the door, watching their hands, and left.
McWhitney sighed. “I sure hope it doesn’t come down to her or me,” he said. “I think I’d lose.”
10
The next day was Friday, and that night the bank would move, so the bank people would have the whole weekend to get everything into its new position. Which meant that today Parker and Dalesia and McWhitney would also make their move.
When the three went out for lunch in Dalesia’s Audi early that afternoon, there were two guys in warmup jackets closing the pool, disassembling the ladders and the board while the clear water glinted a goodbye at the sunless white sky. When they came back, a little before three in the afternoon, a gray cover like a trampoline, its segments stitched together with thick seams, spread across the rectangle of the pool inside its low chain-link fence, and around back a Honda Accord, the same shade of gray as the pool cover, stood just beyond the rented Dodge.
Dalesia drove past it, toward his own room, and Parker saw that there was someone seated at the wheel of the Honda: Wendy Beckham. “Something,” he said.
Dalesia looked at his rearview mirror. “Something?”
“Jake’s sister. I’ll see what it is.”
Dalesia parked, and they got out, McWhitney saying, “I don’t want any more problems.”
“I’ll tell her,” Parker said.
Dalesia said, “We’ll still be ready to go in ten minutes, right?”
“If not, I’ll call your room.”
McWhitney said, “I’m starting to wipe my room down now, and when I’m done, I want to go. I don’t want to stand around with my hands in my pockets, afraid to leave a print somewhere.”
“I’ll see what she wants,” Parker said, and went away from them, over to where Wendy Beckham had gotten out of her car and stood now on the concrete walk in front of it. She was looking past him at the other two, now going into their rooms, and she looked worried.
Parker said, “A message from Jake?”
“A message from me,” she said, and now instead of worried she looked angry. “Jake finally told me what’s going on.”
“That was stupid,” Parker said. “What did he do that for?”
“Because he noticed, very late in the day,” she said, “that he’s the one gonna be left holding the bag.”