“What kind of strange?” He stood in the bedroom doorway and watched her poke at her trim auburn hair, which had been flawless when she started.
“He asked for somebody called Harbin.”
Harbin was the guy in Cincinnati who’d worn the wire. Parker said, “Then what?”
“I said wrong number, he said why didn’t I ask around the people here, and I said there wasn’t anybody to ask, not at the moment. He said he’d call back. There. All right?”
“Perfect,” he said.
The guy called again the next day, Thursday. Claire took the call and brought it to Parker, looking at New England maps in the living room. “It’s him again.”
Parker took the phone, and she went away to give him privacy as he said, “Yeah?”
“I’m looking for Harbin.” The voice was gravelly and a little false; not as though he were trying to sound tougher, but softer.
“Which Harbin would that be?”
“The Harbin from Cincinnati.”
“Don’t know the guy, sorry.”
“Well, wait a minute, I think you can help me.”
“I don’t.”
“From your phone number, I got a pretty good idea your general geographical location. I can get up into that northwest corner of New Jersey in, say, an hour. Give me directions to your place, we can talk it over.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“I just don’t want to leave a stone unturned here,” said the gravelly voice, sliding back and forth between menace and gentleness. “I’m the kind of guy, I’m dogged, I just keep coming.”
“Then I tell you what,” Parker said. “What kind of car you driving?”
“Oh, you wanna meet somewhere else. Sure, that’s okay, I’m in a dark red Chevy Suburban, Illinois plates. What about you?”
“On Route Twenty-four,” Parker told him, “eleven miles from the Delaware Water Gap, there’s a Mobil station, north side of the road. I could be there in two hours.”
“So could I, pal. What kinda car am I looking for?”
“I’ll recognize you,” Parker said.
Of course he didn’t show up, but neither did Parker. The voice had said he could make it to this neighborhood in an hour, so forty-five minutes after the call, Parker took up a position at the diner across the road from the Mobil station and a little farther on toward Pennsylvania. From where he sat, he was unobtrusive, but he could see everything that drove by the Mobil station, and after two hours not one red Chevy Suburban had done so. There were no pedestrians out here along this country road through pine woods, so there was nothing for him to watch for but a car, and none showed up.
Had the guy lied about his car, or was he hanging even farther back somewhere behind Parker or down the other way, eastward, toward New York?
Who had the other people been at that meeting? Parker had never met any of them before except Nick Dalesia. What were their names? Stratton, their host, was the one Dalesia had known, who had invited Dalesia in. McWhitney was the one who’d brought the wired Harbin, but had sworn he hadn’t known about it. The other two were Fletcher and Mott.
This gravelly voice on the phone was none of those, but he had to be connected to one of them. At this point, he could represent either side of the law.
But whatever he represented, Parker wanted nothing to do with him and didn’t want to have to spend a lot of time on him. This week wasn’t so bad, but after this week the bank job could happen on any day. He needed to find out who this guy was, who he was connected to, and what he wanted. And then he needed, one way or another, to make him go away.
Two hours and fifteen minutes outside the diner. It was now three hours since the call. Parker started the Lexus and drove away from there, not seeing any sudden activity in his mirrors.
He drove to the turnoff at the lake road, made the turn, and then drove very slowly, watching the intersection back there. He was almost around the first curve to the left, which would block the view, when a small black car made the turn into his mirror.
He accelerated around the curve, then slowed again. This road went all the way around the lake, partly straightaways and partly left-leaning curves, and then came back out onto the state highway two miles farther west.
Because he’d accelerated into the curve, then slowed, the small black car was closer when it next appeared, but it immediately braked, its nose dipping, then came on more slowly, trying to hang farther back.
It was the stutter that said this was no civilian. Parker drove on past his own driveway, with the mailbox marked WILLIS, the name Claire used around here. Behind him, the black car kept pace, well back.
At the far end of the lake was a clubhouse Parker had never entered. The summer people used it for a number of things; then it was open weekends only, in fall and spring. It was closed now, the vehicles of a few maintenance workers clustered up against the low clapboard building. Parker turned in there, stopped among the other parked cars, and watched the black car, a Honda Accord with the mud of many miles on it, stream steadily by. The driver, alone in the car, was a woman. It was hard to see her face, because she was talking on a cell phone.
Parker pulled out of the lot and followed the Honda, pacing it the way she had paced him. She must have seen him back there but did nothing about it, kept a steady thirty-four miles an hour all the way around the lake, signaled for a right at the state highway, and turned north, toward the Mobil station.
And beyond. He followed her across the bridge at the Delaware Water Gap and into a mall on the other side.
